Intelligent Housing for People and Technology: Examining Sustainable Housing Beyond the Technical and the Opportunities for Design

Abstract

Housing is often identified as a core contributor to the UK energy concerns, with figures of 27% (Edwards and Hyett, Rough guide to sustainability, RIBA, London, 2002; Department of Energy and Climate Change, Digest of United Kingdom energy statistics, 2009) of the country’s CO₂ emissions produced within the home. This concern has created a new perspective on housing design within Architecture and the Built Environment with an increasingly emphasis on technical efficiency. Intelligent solutions within housing environments are increasingly playing a sustainable role; phase change materials are now incorporated in paint and wall surfaces and reactive monitoring offers wider interactivity for homeowners. Whilst it may be easy to assume a trickle-down effect of these technologies in some form into mainstream housing, the sociological factors are also central to enabling sustainable results. In losing sight of this, many technically-oriented built environments have been significantly less efficient during their occupancy than predicted (Roy and Herring, Technovation J 27(4):194–203, 2007; Chappells and Shove, Build Res Inf 33(1):32–40, 2001). To compound this issue, much of sustainable architectural literature appears divided of their view of technologies to achieve sustainability; either overtly promoting technical solutions to solve sustainable agendas or pessimistically shows technological inclusion as a ‘doom-and-gloom’ scenario. This paper looks takes a more rounded open view, in examining intelligent technology beyond functional efficiency, and does not enter into the beneficial/detrimental debate of techno-centric sustainable design. This research will consider the inclusion of differing technologies within current sustainable projects. Examinations will relate the primary functions of the sustainable housing technologies alongside their social context to outline how these technologies can offer technical efficiency and wider social values. This work therefore highlights the need to explore intelligent technologies from a broader view of the overall environment and not simply secularly within a technical component or system.