Implications of a Data-Driven Built Environment

It is clear both locally and abroad that the real estate industry is turning to metrics to validate and evaluate buildings. The reasons for this trend are wide-ranging. They span the need to adhere to new regulations, the desire to improve building performance through modeling, measurement, and benchmarking, and the aspiration to revolutionize building design and engineering to take into account user behavior and to maximize their satisfaction. These objectives stem from recognition by the industry that embracing sustainability will have favorable impacts on efforts to reduce GHG emissions and energy consumption, increase environmental health and safety for building occupants, and concurrently positively affect the financial bottom-line.

Independent of goals, the consensus is that metrics are the future of buildings. However, currently, every segment of the industry is looking at the issue from its own silo and generating reams of sector specific data. Without the proper tools, standards, and analytics the resulting overwhelming data tsunami could potentially lead to frustration and resistance to the market transformation opportunities created by the data's availability. What would be beneficial is a comprehensive view that identifies what each sector needs—operators, owners, regulators, bankers, underwriters, and tenants—in order to leverage all of these needs to move the industry forward, systematically.

In order to begin to address this, the New York Academy of Sciences is hosting this conference on the utilization of data in the Built Environment. We are eager to develop and mainstream the Green Building 'discipline' and integrate it into relevant subject areas such as data analytics and machine learning. As a first step, we aim to present a vision for what data we should be collecting in order to transform the industry.

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