The Brains4Buildings project aims to develop methods to design new smart building climate management systems that, among other things, reduce energy consumption, increase comfort and respond flexibly to user behavior. We set out to develop design guidelines to help B4B stakeholders when designing innovative user interfaces for such systems. We built upon our prior user research and requirements (deliverables 3.04 & 3.09) to formulate design dimensions. The dimensions encompass the different elements of user control and system feedback and the range in which they can exist. The design dimensions played a key role as a foundation for the design process and during evaluation and analysis. Within this work package, we ultimately want to gain a deeper understanding of the elements of the design dimensions and to formulate design guidelines. Building climate systems are generally designed for the specific context/building they are built into and thus the goals for the user interfaces can vary greatly. Therefore, a well-defined use case was necessary, which we defined in collaboration with one of our work package partners - Spectral. We chose an iterative approach to design for the use case, moving between design, prototype and test phases, depending on the insights gained along the way. Finally, we synthesized a list of key insights that led to design guidelines. In our final deliverable (D3.11) we aim to evaluate these guidelines.
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B4B is a multi-year, multi-stakeholder project focused on developing methods to harness big data from smart meters, building management systems and the Internet of Things devices, to reduce energy consumption, increase comfort, respond flexibly to user behaviour and local energy supply and demand, and save on installation maintenance costs. This will be done through the development of faster and more efficient Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence models and algorithms. The project is geared to existing utility buildings such as commercial and institutional buildings.
