The future of the built environment

0:00Rishee Jain:This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. I thought it would be good to revisit the original intent of this show. In 2017, when we started, we wanted to create a forum to dive into and discuss the motivations and the research that my colleagues do across the campus in science, technology, engineering, medicine, and other topics. Stanford University and all universities, for the most part, have a long history of doing important work that impacts the world. and it's a joy to share with you how this work is motivated by humans who are working hard to create a better future for everybody.

0:37Rishee Jain:In that spirit, I hope you will walk away from every episode with a deeper understanding of the work that's in progress here and that you'll share it with your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers as well.

0:49Russ Altman:Traditionally, engineers have thought as our buildings and our infrastructure as simply, there's a bunch of people here, they need water, They need energy. Let's build a pipe. Let's build some electrical cables. They need a place to live. Let's build some buildings. That was how we did things 25, 30 years ago. And I think what has shifted now is a more nuanced understanding of how people use spaces. What do they actually need and how can we can respond as infrastructure?

1:22Rishee Jain:This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If you enjoy the future of everything, please hit follow in whatever app you're listening to right now. It'll guarantee that you never miss the future of anything. Today, Rishi Jain will tell us that although we do design the buildings in which we live and work, they also affect our behavior. He and his colleagues are coming up with ways to dynamically change those environments so they adapt to our activities and our preferences. It's the future of the built environment. We have a new segment that we're introducing today at the Future of Everything called Future in a Minute.

1:59Rishee Jain:At the end of this segment, after I'm done talking to the guest about their work, I'm going to ask them a few questions and ask them for rapid-fire responses that they will respond to, and we'll present it in our new segment, which, as I said, is called Future in a Minute. Before we get started, please remember to follow the podcast in whatever app you're listening to so you never miss the future of anything and you're alerted to every episode.

2:29Rishee Jain:So when you think about the built environment, you think about buildings, sidewalks, parks, gardens, infrastructure like the pipes that bring us water, take away waste, electricity, internet. But you know, there's been changes in how we design environments. In the old days, we just built a building, put it up, waited for 30 years until it was out of commission, took it down, built another one. There's now a new generation of civil and environmental engineer that's thinking about how can we make these buildings more sustainable? How can we have them adapt to our new ways of working? A lot of us work at home.

3:05Rishee Jain:We go to work and we just borrow some space for a while. When you're in that space, how do you make sure the temperature is a good temperature? How do you make sure that the lighting is right for you? How do you make sure you engage in healthy behaviors at work? Get up, walk around. All those things are something that a clever architect and a smart engineer can design and build to make these buildings better and last longer. Well, Rishi Jain is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and he's an expert at the interaction and intersection between buildings and social systems.

3:40Rishee Jain:He's going to tell us that you can expect buildings of the future to be much more responsive to your needs, much more flexible, and hopefully more comfortable. Rishi, what made you decide to focus on the built urban environment and ways to improve it as the focus of your professional research life?

4:00Russ Altman:Well, thanks, Russ, for having me on the show, first and foremost. You know, for me, it was really about being able to touch and feel what I work on every day. And so I remember, you know, for me, I used to help my dad around the house, a bunch of things, doing home projects and building things. And that's what got me interested in understanding how we shape our built environment in BuildX. And then as I sort of progressed in my educational career, I realized that this is something that I can design, build, engineer, and then actually get to touch and actually see the end product. And I think that's hard to do in some modern technologies when they're especially gone more digital.

4:44Russ Altman:Of course, I do a lot of stuff on the digital domain, But eventually, hopefully it gets built and we get to touch and feel it.

4:51Rishee Jain:That's great. And so on your on your like on your web pages and in your writings, you talk about this is not just about technical engineering stuff. There's also a social aspect. And people might be very surprised that somebody who's thinking about how to build buildings is thinking about the social side of that. So what is the social side of the urban built environment?

5:13Russ Altman:So I think that's, you know, a great point. And I think traditionally, engineers have thought as our buildings and our infrastructure as simply, there's a bunch of people here. They need water. They need energy. Let's build a pipe. Let's build some electrical cables. They need a place to live. Let's build some buildings. That was how we did things 25, 30 years ago. And I think what has shifted now is a more nuanced understanding of how people use spaces. What do they actually need? And how can we can respond as infrastructure? So I like to give this example of, you know, traditionally it was just, you know, there was some demand.

5:49Russ Altman:People needed some infrastructure. We built it. We scoped the size and we built it and that was it. Now we're sort of in this new, I would say, era of infrastructure where we can dynamically match supply and demand. Now to be an example of that, how we use energy or electricity can change dramatically, you know, in the day. You know, I'm not a morning riser. My wife is, so her coffee gets made two hours before mine. Mine comes a little bit later. My five-year-old's running around in between and using various things. And so the way we live our life and the social dimension of our interactions frame and are embedded in our engineering decisions.

6:30Russ Altman:Another quick example is, I think the COVID pandemic and the work from home really taught us to value our in-person interactions. So a lot of work we've been doing is understanding how people move in building spaces, how we can design collaborative environments that are also sustainable. So, you know, you're not double heating and cooling if people are working from home and also cooling office spaces and how you understand and maximize that potential. So that's really what informs and was really drove me to embed the social dimension and how we design and build buildings.

7:03Rishee Jain:You've also talked about and written how although we design, you and your colleagues design buildings using these kinds of considerations, once the building exists, it also shapes the behavior of the people who are using the building. And I want to ask you about that, because of course that's true, right? It makes sense that the building I'm in is going to put constraints on what I can do during my day. But I have a feeling that we haven't thought, I think you have, but many of the rest of us haven't thought about the ways that the design decisions of the buildings we are living and working in are actually changing things like our health and our attitudes towards the world.

7:46Russ Altman:Absolutely, absolutely. And so I think this is also a sort of a new shift in the way engineers are approaching things. Before, we simply thought we shape our infrastructure is how I like to put it. Now I think there's an understanding that our infrastructure shapes us too. And the reason that's important is, you know, there's been lots of studies done by some of my colleagues that under trying to understand your exposure to nature. You know, what is the value of having that window and seeing a tree outside in terms of as you go throughout your day? And it's been demonstrated to have huge impacts on productivity, well-being metrics, overall satisfaction, happiness.

8:26Russ Altman:These are the type of things that that are changing. You know, a common example that's sort of given, you know, in the literature is if you don't have sidewalks, people won't walk. If you don't feel safe to walk down the street and you're, you know, worried about that, you won't walk. This is also the case of bike lanes and these sort of things. And so we have to start thinking about when we design our infrastructure that we're not just designing for the next three to five years, but how do we build in some flexibility? What does the future look like? How do we think about how future inhabitants can help shape the infrastructure because it will inevitably shape that?

8:59Russ Altman:And so I think that's been a shift. Previously, we said we're going to build something. It's going to stand for 30 years and we're going to tear it down and build something new. I think that that sort of mode of thinking has evolved.

9:11Rishee Jain:So this is great. And so one more kind of just preliminary, almost like a definition, is when I look at your papers that you've written and talks you've given, you sometimes use the phrase urban form. It appears in a lot of the titles of your papers. What do you mean by urban form? And this, I think a related question is, what is the unit that you think about? Do you think about a single building or do you think about a neighborhood or an entire city? As you're doing your work, I think it would be helpful to understand what the scope is that you're considering. For example, you just mentioned pedestrian sidewalks and bike lanes.

9:47Rishee Jain:That's outside of a building. So that makes me guess that you're thinking beyond the building. So talk to me about that.

9:54Russ Altman:That's a great question, Russ. So urban form, what we mean by that is the type and where buildings are laid out in the city. In addition to that, where you put green spaces, where you put roads, you could think of this as the layout. You know, if you were the SimCity designer and you were plopping things in your little virtual world, that's what we're talking about here. And so my work actually sort of spans all these dimensions. We tend to think of things where we call intra-building dynamics. What happens within a building? How people are moving, how they're consuming energy. Then zoom up a little bit of what happens in the neighborhood, you know, and then finally, you know, zooming all the way back up.

10:36Russ Altman:What happens in a big city across a city like San Francisco or the Bay Area as a whole? And I think what's interesting is making the connections between these scales. That's where a lot of the innovation has happened because, you know, as what you are doing within your building, as you zoom up to your neighborhood, has an impact. And as you zoom up to your city, has an impact, especially as you aggregate these choices and this behavior.

10:58Rishee Jain:So that's great. But it raises a kind of maybe a logistical question is that means you have to get a lot of people on board for this activity, right? If you are looking at a single building project, there's, you know, somebody owns the land, they want to build a building, boom, okay, we have all the deciders in the room. If you're looking at a neighborhood or two owners or five owners or 20 owners. So is the world set up to implement your vision given these kind of real world constraints?

11:27Russ Altman:So I think that's a, you know, that's a, that is a huge challenge. And I think what we often do is the decision maker and stakeholders are different at each scale. So if I'm thinking at the urban scale, it's often policymakers. People are making land use decisions. What and where you can build this? How high you can build this? So they're dictating those rules. They're not dictating down to the design of a window. But inevitably, that big design decision floats down to the neighborhood, where people are making decisions about where you're going to place parks. If you're going to allow a bike lane to be in a certain neighborhood or in a certain throughway, are you going to enable parking?

12:06Russ Altman:These sort of things are in the neighborhood. And then finally, at the building scale, where you have the owner and operator of the building, They're accounting for those and making decisions based on that and how they design. The architect's going to design based on sort of what those are. The engineer is going to design based on that. So they kind of fit together. While the stakeholders are different, they are inherently sort of linked at the hip, if I could say so. And so you have to take into account these different levers that sort of occur at each different scale. It also makes it difficult because, as you can imagine, changing policy is very different than convincing one building owner.

12:42Russ Altman:But we tend to see innovations happen both top down and bottom up. If, you know, the bottom up approach is you see a new building being built or something, you know, being adopted and folks say, well, we want that amenity too. Or, you know, that's huge. And that's helpful. You see a new neighborhood park in your friend's neighborhood. You may say, hey, why don't we have bike lanes in a park like that? And then when it gets to, you know, the city scale, it eventually floats up. Then you have to move the opposite direction. We have a directive or a change in policy. A big debate right now is the reforms to CEQA, which for folks that don't know, is the big environmental bill that helps or I would say dictates where and how you can build and the environmental review that's necessary for building housing in California.

13:32Russ Altman:So changes in that are a big top down approach in which that would shift all the way down to the system. Great.

13:39Rishee Jain:Okay. So now we've set it up. We know what we're talking about. I'm very excited. One of the things that you work on is you talk about and work on dynamic infrastructure. And you've already said that in the olden days, it was kind of static. It's like, let's make a plan. Let's build it. Hopefully, we'll get 30 years out of it. And then we get a chance to redo it. But you have a very different model. And I wonder if you can flesh out what it means to have a dynamic infrastructure, because it kind of makes my brain explode, because I guess I'm an old guy and I'm just thinking about buildings and sidewalks.

14:12Rishee Jain:It's like, what can be dynamic? But I think you have thought about ways to make this dynamic.

14:17Russ Altman:Yeah. So, you know, I'll give you an example, you know, at the building scale and then maybe at the urban scale. So at the building scale, as we've seen this shift from return to after the pandemic of everybody working from home to more hybrid work, we've actually been able to explore and understand how different spaces can be utilized in different ways. You know, often you had offices, conference room. Those were sort of very stagnant places where people either work by themselves or work together. Now we have this, you know, dynamic dimension of hotspotting. People will come in and sign into a desk.

14:54Russ Altman:Then they often will, you know, camp out in a certain co-working space or, you know, have meetings in the conference room. What we can see now is that we can understand where people are using these spaces and then dynamically shift things around. This allows us to shut down heating and cooling in some parts of the building that are no longer being used when before we would heat and cool the entire building. So that's kind of what we mean by dynamic is responding.

15:19Rishee Jain:I was going to say, what are the other levers? So I love the example of the thermostat because anybody who's been in an office likely has either been part of or witnessed thermostat wars between the people who are running warm and the people who are running. And if you can solve that, thank you. Are there other – what are the other levers that you can kind of turn to modify an environment on the fly? Yeah.

15:45Russ Altman:So, you know, I think the two big levers that people interact with are thermal, which is, as you said, the thermostat, the comfort. The other thing is lighting. And so things that have been really, you know, clever and cool and dynamic is you can have dynamic shading. So you can turn a space that was previously really hard to work on a computer with because of glare into a work-friendly environment by dropping shades or tinting the windows dynamically to encourage people to shift to that space. You can also turn on different types of lighting. We now understand that different types of lighting encourage different types of work.

16:22Russ Altman:You know, lighting that mimics the sun is really great for concentrated work. lighting that mimics sort of, you know, more or less daylight and is lower on the Kelvin scale is more for casual work and these sort of things, maybe mingling. So these are the sort of levers we're starting to think about at the building scale. But let me take you to the other side, where the time and spatial, you know, dimensions change. So a big sort of, you know, thing that's been happening, I live in San Francisco, and so I've been experiencing this, but I give you an example, is the city has turned to turning many of the city streets into night markets in which they shut it down to vehicular traffic once a month.

17:03Russ Altman:And there's various different themes in which now these become pedestrian friendly plazas in which people can now use them in a very different fashion. And you see this with farmers markets and various different things. That is a way that the infrastructure is responding. It's often hard to rip up streets, but as soon as you shut down traffic, now this becomes a very different place for gathering than it was previously when you were constrained to the sidewalks. So these are the type of things we're thinking about. When you do these things, there's also downstream effects, right? The impact it can have on traffic, how people are consuming energy, all these things are that.

17:39Russ Altman:So we have to take those into account and that's what makes it fun to model at least.

17:44Rishee Jain:Yeah, that's really exciting. And I love that example because I think many of us have found the COVID, you know, the restaurants, the spilling onto the street, the farmer's markets. These have all been, at least in my neighborhood, huge improvements to the quality of life. But I can imagine that you might want to have a system that is being smart about the lights, the traffic lights and the stop signs in the area dynamically because traffic patterns will change and availability of streets will change. So those examples are great. This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Rishi Jain.

18:20Rishee Jain:next.

18:37Rishee Jain:Welcome back to the Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Rishi Jain from Stanford University. In the first segment, Rishi told us about the built environment, The buildings, sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, and cities in which many of us live. How do we design those to be maximally flexible as our work habits, our play habits, and the climate are all changing? In this segment, we're going to focus specifically on heat and climate change. There are increasing temperatures in many parts of the world, and that has real implications for how Rishi and his colleagues build buildings.

19:13Rishee Jain:He'll tell us about an exciting project in Indonesia and also some of the things that we can do to help make our own homes and workplaces a little bit more comfortable and resilient. Also, at the end of this interview, we're going to introduce a new segment. We're calling it The Future in a Minute. I'm going to ask Rishi a few questions. He's going to give me some rapid fire answers, and that'll tie a bow around this episode. But Rishi, I wanted to ask you about climate change because I'm imagining and I know that this is affecting how you think about the built environment and how you're actually building buildings.