WestHouse in Vancouver Sun

posted: february 19. 2010

You have just purchased the latest and greatest in digital cameras. It has a super-density LCD monitor, an 11-point AF system, GPS recording and 3D colour matrix metering with scene recognition.

From the sounds of it, the product has more features -- and is just as complicated -- as an airplane cockpit panel. But can the average person take a decent picture with it? It's great to have advanced options, but gadgets with multiple features are only successful if they are easy for people to understand and use.

Whole-house monitoring and automation systems that allow residents to track and control everything from kilowatt hours and water usage to air quality and carbon emissions are becoming increasingly popular in newer ecominded construction. These "smart home" controls provide valuable information about a building's performance -- things like energy consumption and water usage-- and are particularly useful to building professionals.

However, people like Lyn Bartram of the Simon Fraser University School of Interactive Arts and Technology realize that many of us do not relate to all the numbers, or even want understand what they mean. Most of us, including some engineers, just want simple signs and systems that help us make better choices. Bartram and her colleagues are working to create just that through human-centred technology.

A glowing example of some of the school's efforts can be found in West House, currently on display at the Olympic LiveCity Yaletown site. The West House, a highly efficient, two-level laneway home, with 610 feet of living space and a 226-square-foot garage, was designed and built in partnership with Smallworks Studios and Laneway Housing, the municipal and federal governments, and a long list of local business talent.

The West House is the first home of its kind to be constructed in Vancouver since the city passed zoning for laneway housing, and showcases B.C.'s leading-edge, clean-energy green building, and the innovative smart-home control technologies that Bartram and her colleagues have been working on. The home's Adaptive Living Interface System, as it is called, consists of interactive touch screens that can control everything from heating to lighting, an ambient wall in the kitchen backsplash that lights up to show how much energy the house is saving, and mobile features that allow residents to adjust the home's settings remotely from a smart phone.

Bartram, a computer science instructor, jokes that even though she understands what volts, amps, and kilowatt hours are, sometimes all she really want to know is whether or not she can run the vacuum. "Don't throw engineering at me when I'm busy," says Bartram, "I'm trying to make a decision and just want to know."

In designing more human-friendly home automation systems, Bartram notes that rather than just throwing more data at people, she and her colleagues are looking at "how do you give it to them in a way that helps them use it without making them feel that 'Oh God, it is one more thing I need to look up.' We are trying to put things into people's living environments so that it is easy for people [to make decisions]."

"It is about how people use technology, rather than technology itself," says Robert Woodbury, one of Bartram's colleagues and a professor at SFU. "Everyone knows how difficult the human-computer interface on a video player is," he says. "It is the same thing [with building systems]; a controllable thermostat is something that only a 13-year-old can program. Our devices are needlessly complex. We're trying to make them more effective, and much, much simpler."

While energy performance is a key element of green design, and the West House's high-efficiency design and solar energy system exemplifies the latest and greatest, Bartram points out that "a sustainable home is not just a green home, or a high-performance home. It is a living experience in which the people in that home make better energy-and water-use decisions."

"You can have the greenest house on the planet," she says, "but if you're not making effective decisions then you're not really helping, or at least not as much as you could."

Jake Fry, whose company Smallworks has been creating buildings with superior thermal and air-quality performance since its inception several years ago, was quite excited by the smart-home control technologies.

"We were already on that path," says Fry, "but this allowed us to jump ahead that much earlier. He says the Adaptive Living Interface System offers the sophistication needed to run and integrate the home's complex systems without being burdensome to the residents.

Fry wasn't the only one impressed -- and keen to bring the West House project to fruition. The home had the support of David Ramslie, sustainable development program manager for the City of Vancouver, financial backing from the federal government's Western Diversification Program, and the assistance of a bevy of new technologies and local expertise including MSR Innovations, Day-4Energy, Embedded Automation, Schneider Electric, Pulse Energy, Terasen Gas, and Ver-Tek. It was designed and built in a mere couple of months, just in time for the Olympics.

Following the Games, the house will be relocated within Vancouver. It will be used as a living laboratory to conduct applied research with industry, a site that will be a prototype for the testing of new technologies, a practical platform for technology transfer, and a student internship site.

"We shouldn't be developing technology in isolation," says Mario Pinto, vice-president of research at SFU. "We should be developing it as part of the site, under living conditions, with people interacting and providing feedback. The truly successful outcome is where normal people embrace these technologies and incorporate them into their daily lives. That is the real goal. Because until you achieve that, you won't be saving energy."

The West House can be toured at no cost until Feb. 28 at LiveCity Yaletown.

Kim Davis' Living Green column appears regularly in the Saturday Westcoast Homes section.

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