A NEW WAY

Serious challenges are already facing the property and construction industries; buildings now account for 40% of the world’s CO2 emissions, tenants want more flexibility in their commercial terms and are demanding higher quality experiences. The problem is that digital transformation of both industries is occurring at glacial pace.

The Smart Core Foundation creates community engagement material, design tools, deployment patterns and software to accelerate reliable and secure deployments of technology in buildings, all licensed as part of the Creative Commons.

Building stronger foundations

A foundation is a non-governmental entity that is established as a non-profit corporation or a charitable trust, with a principal purpose of making grants to related organisations, institutions, or individuals for scientific, educational, cultural, religious, or other charitable purposes.

Similarly, building foundations provide support for structures, transferring their load to layers of soil or rock that have sufficient bearing capacity and suitable settlement characteristics to support them.

We see huge risks for building owners and operators locked in to poorly executed projects and propitiatory products, both with associated long-running contracts. As such, the Smart Core Foundation develops approaches to achieving genuinely open building technology interoperability to ensure these expensive assets deliver exceptional user experiences through their entire lifecycle – from concept to demolition.

COMMUNITY

We believe we’re better together. Very little work is currently shared openly about properly integrating technology in the property and construction space (sometimes referred to as PropTech). We want to welcome you to an open, sharing community that diversely represents a wide range of disciplines associated with the built environment.

SMART CORE BUILDING OS

The Smart Core Building OS is an operating system (like Microsoft Windows or Apple’s MacOS) specifically built for buildings. It promotes a distributed architecture, an abstraction layer and common tools through which to deploy applications offering specific functionality to people who use or need to maintain physical spaces. The focus of the OS is to enable integrations to happen quickly and consistently rather than offering libraries of pre-built and potentially unsuitable drivers.

PATTERNS

Buildings contain most of the same stuff when it comes to the systems used to run and manage them- physical access control, heating, ventilation, resource management / booking and energy control. Design patterns in software offer  ‘generally repeatable solutions to commonly occurring problems’ – we intend to extend these to cover the network infrastructure and hardware that runs buildings too.

Why now is the right time for smart core

Past attempts

The past decade has seen technology in buildings take huge leaps forward, resulting in more efficient spaces through connected systems. However, these connections are typically made in a point-to-point fashion, making changing or upgrading systems difficult and expensive. These deployments can’t easily facilitate data extraction or analysis either and certainly don’t facilitate industry-demands for self-optimising buildings enabled by machine learning. 

The future is now

The systems that exist in buildings are nearly all now comprised of IT components and are network-based, meaning the potential already exists to integrate them and their devices with one another, in standardised ways. This unlocks the ability to create the experiences the next generation of building users expect. Huge financial and energy efficiencies can also be realised by re-thinking how technology is installed and commissioned in to buildings.

Where can Smart Core make a difference?

COMMERCIAL

Spaces where business happens.
Single or owner-occupied buildings and multi-tenanted offices where an exceptional experience secures energy efficiency, optimal space utilisation and improved productivity, talent attraction and retention.

HOSPITALITY

Spaces where people stay and/or are entertained.
Hotels, conference centres, sales suites or other revenue-generating spaces. Good experience means stronger brand engagement and reinforcement through technology with moments of delight that people want to share with others.

EDUCATION

Spaces where people learn and/or stay.
Helping to digitally enable new buildings as well as connect legacy building stock to create consistent experiences with inconsistent technology. Student experience is what matters most and directly impacts institutions’ bottom lines.

RESIDENTIAL

Spaces where people live in communities
Enabling residents of multi-dwelling units and private residential schemes to benefit from the multi-site efficiencies that can be had with these types of homes. Having a great place to live also maximises resident retention for landlords.

Who could benefit from smart core?

Owners

Building owners and asset managers

Operators

Facilities managers and outsourced operators

Developers

Construction project and commissioning managers

Integrators

Technologists who design and deploy technology in buildings

End users

Employees, guests, residents, and students

Who’s behind the Smart Core Foundation?

Smart Core has been developed by internationally award-winning Master Systems Integrator Vanti (based in Birmingham, UK). We are committed to delivering exceptional experiences for our clients but found ourselves hampered by existing methods and proprietary technologies.

With a wealth of experience in experience design, installation, engineering, commissioning, operation, optimisation and decommissioning building systems, and having worked within the construction industry for years, we understand how commercial building programming works, and have spun-out the Smart Core Foundation to address the issues we’ve identified for the benefit of multiple industries.

Why are you ‘giving it all away’?

We decided it would be more beneficial for everyone (including Vanti) if the work produced by the Smart Core Foundation was freely available to those who wished to use it and also ensured anyone making enhancements to it also had to release their work under the same terms.

We don’t believe in zero-sum games and there’s more than enough work to go around, with current estimates suggesting that there’ll be 2.6 billion buildings in the world by 2060. Even if every engineer in building services came together around this idea, we would still need even more people to develop all of the expected new buildings as well as refurbishing and refitting existing building stock.

We also strongly believe that by establishing a community of people using Smart Core patterns and software, we’ll be able to source more ideas to improve them and get closer to the goal of having a standardised approach to the integration of building technology. Getting to this point will benefit everyone involved in these industries as it will allow us to all speak the same language during design, construction and operation, working better together.

GET INVOLVED

We’re getting ready for our initial public releases of our design patterns and Smart Core Building OS. We need forward-thinking individuals and organisations to partner with us in developing the Smart Core Foundation further:

Investors: join Vanti in sponsoring the not-for-profit Smart Core Foundation for mutual and industry gain. Investors will be invited to shape the foundation’s output as well as get early access to new releases and updates. 

Contributors: technical writers and software developers who have an interest in this space.

Moderators: anyone who has experience working with diverse communities of people with differing wants and needs.

If you’re interested in joining us, or simply want to find out more about what we have in mind, please fill in the contact form opposite and we’ll be in touch.





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