[Above: Arup Office Realtime]

We just launched Arup Office Realtime, a data visualisation designed around the firm’s sustainability objectives. Office Realtime is a system that presents live data streamed to our offices and includes paper usage, electricity consumption, transport updates, carbon generated by air travel and more…

For nearly two years, Andrew Maher, myself and countless other Arupians dotted around the globe have discussed data visualisation as a way to better communicate the content we create on projects; and up until recently the challenge has been to find data or analysis results that present well and make immediate sense to the audience.  Part of the challenge with design and engineering data is that as soon as a design changes, so do the analysis results; affecting the intended visualisation immediately.  For a graphic designer to spend even a short amount of time visualising data, the results, and therefore the design, would have to remain unchanged for as long as possible.  But what about information that is already readily available and ordinarily invisible within the workplace?  And what about information that could be collected and be viewed in realtime?

[Above: Me, Andrew and Toby at the launch]

This project has some history,  around 18 months ago, Andrew Maher attended a meeting with our sustainability consultants to discuss how he could help to further develop the way they communicate their work. One of the outcomes was the 1200 Buildings data visualisation as visualisation was something clients were beginning to ask for.

Then in 2010, Gerard Healey dodged the ash cloud and undertook a world tour of intelligent buildings; those buildings in which active measures were being taken in design and operation to reduce the amount of energy consumed and to change their occupants behaviour.  Gerard sent back stories and photos for the Fields of Activity blog and it has been one of our most popular blog posts.

Soon after that, Mike Rainbow (Building Sustainability) approached Diana Coelho (Organisational Psychologist) and Andrew to help with a presentation for a new fit-out project. The client had a comprehensive sustainability strategy which was largely reliant on the building performance after the fit-out.  Mike suggested to client that we could make a small intervention to engage their staff and change behaviours – Mike’s idea was to highlight paper use in realtime and broadcast consumption back to staff. They liked the idea, but wanted to know who had done it previously – but who had done it?  No one, that we knew of.

Not long after that, as part of Arup’s Sustainability Policy (we implemented a certified Environmental Management System (ISO 14001) across the region), workshops were held for all Arup staff; an extraordinary effort in itself. One of the aims was to educate all about reducing energy and waste by at least 5% in 2011.  Following the workshops, I briefly discussed publishing paper usage with Aaron Yuen, our Key Environmental Representative in Melbourne, and Peter Bowtell, then Melbourne Office Leader, via the intranet. Andrew was having similar discussions with the same and many other people, including public transport companies, but on a much, much more grand a scale.  (At least twice a year, I feel like working with Andrew is a bit like Marconi and Tesla; we both have similar ideas, but it takes a few days, or a few weeks for us to come together and realise we’re talking about the same thing.)

[Above: Office launch]

Late last year, Andrew employed Tom Gasson, a computer science student, to start collecting the data that was available; printer usage, flights and carbon emissions region-wide, realtime computer usage, and energy data; and to start building a database, as well as using Processing to visualise the data.  He then approached Toby Welch and I about creating the web-based front-end to display the data on large LCD screens in the office entryways.  After all, what better way to encourage change than to promote current energy and waste usage to clients?  Part of Andrew’s inspiration was Sprint’s Now Network advertisement; a feat in programming perhaps, but a struggle to interpret at a glance; one has to view it as a proof of concept more than a working example.  Toby and I started to think about what we could do.

Yes, the irony of trying to reduce energy by displaying the information on large flatscreens does not escape us.  In our own defence, let’s just look at few initiatives we have had in place for the last year or more:

• Lighting in our offices is controlled by sensors.  No movement? No lights.
• All printers, including plotters, enter sleep mode after being idle for half an hour.
• In the Melbourne office, we have had a Paperless Office initiative in place for the last 4 years, and for an engineering firm, we print surprisingly few drawings.
• Provision of recycle bins for waste plastics, aluminium, and paper
• Recycling of IT equipment via a third party
• Utilisation of alternatives to air travel e.g. video conferencing
• Last year, across the region, IT rolled out mandatory overnight shutdowns for all computers.  This process can only be manually bypassed if you are still using your  computer in the hour prior to shutdown.

On top of the initiatives we already had in place, we also had specific requirements for the screens to display the information on.  They had to be LED, they had to be at least a six-star rating, and it had to be rated at less than 150W.  The screens we have since purchased are rated at 98W, around a third of a standard PC.

The initial planning of the project also enabled us to purchase energy meters to be installed in our Melbourne office.  The meters will allow energy consumption to be monitored in realtime, feed into our database, which can then allow reports to be run whenever we want or need them.

We began with a simple interface to observe and measure our data before Andrew Buckley took over the look and feel.  In the last week before the launch, we rewrote the backend code from scratch; finally settling for pure HTML5 and CSS3 and a compliant browser (Google Chrome).  We also worked on the idea that the incentive for behavioural change can be as easy as promoting healthy competition between offices.  To do this we are going to take the totals for each set of data, and work out the averages per capita for each office.  In the coming weeks, after the rollout to the east coast; we hope that people will think twice about printing those two page emails; knowing that staff in another office, on average, print 10 pages less a day than us.

[Above: The average Arupian page]

How is our custom approach to the dashboard different to a building management system (BMS)?  Building management systems are great – for building managers, but what if you just occupy one level?  Typically, BMS dashboards equate energy to cost and cost savings over time, but we wanted to show usage in terms of environmental impact, and not simply translate everything back to dollars and cents.  We’ve taken data that applies to everyone in our office, and presented it in an engaging, aesthetically pleasing way.

We’ve just rolled the Office Realtime out to the Melbourne office.  Our staff are impressed and keen to track usage over the coming months, and our Sustainability team is happy.  Very happy.  Next are launches in Sydney and Brisbane.  And all of this just to keep us conscious of how much impact we make; compared to how little impact we could make.

Want to know more?  Come see for yourself.  Did I mention that we also included public transport information on the display as well?  No?  Well that’s quite vital actually.  For staff and clients alike, as we leave the office we can now check when our tram is coming, or whether the train service is ok or not.  That’s actually one thing that our Office Realtime may not have the power to change.  Yet.

Here’s a list of the team, and without the support and enthusiasm of a larger number of people, the core project wouldn’t have happened in such a short amount of time.

Project Team:

Andrew Maher, Tom Gasson, Toby Welch, Andrew Buckley, Dean Morris &  Scott Fagg