Buildings are becoming increasingly intelligent. We monitor energy, water, mechanical systems, and security. Yet one operational system remains largely invisible.
Biology.
Thinking in Public is a collection of essays exploring how biology may become another operational system — through integrated sensing, environmental data and operational intelligence.
These are not finished ideas. They are carefully researched questions intended to encourage discussion across Facility Management, Building Science, Engineering and Environmental Health.
Every discipline begins with better questions.
Working titles for essays currently under research. Publication dates will be announced as each is completed.
Defining the discipline, its scope, and how it differs from adjacent fields.
Water is the upstream condition of almost every biological event in a building.
What emerging research reveals about the invisible ecology of the built environment.
Reading thermal signatures as biological, structural and environmental evidence.
A thought experiment on scoring the biological state of physical assets.
Applying the vocabulary of engineering reliability to living systems.
What a living, sensed model of a building's biological state might look like.
On how new instrumentation reshapes the questions an industry is willing to ask.
The origin, the evolution, and why the discipline must outgrow its starting point.
Thinking in Public will become the intellectual heart of Beacon — a growing library of essays, research briefs and white papers on the emerging discipline of Biological Asset Intelligence.
New essays published as the thinking matures.