Articles

After months of strict lockdown, children in the UK will return to school on Monday next week. Similar “return-to-learn” plans are being rolled out in countries across Europe, in many US states, and in nations across the world in order to limited the negative impacts of disrupted education on childrens’ development. However, as the pandemic […]

Some of the most symbolic images of the past year have been of empty city centers. Deserted images Times Square, Covent Garden, Champs-Élysées, and Shibuya commercial district would have been impossible to capture before the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders that COVID-19 brought about. Our cities have felt the greatest impact of the pandemic and this […]

The Internet of Things (IoT) in smart buildings, homes, and cities has triggered a digital revolution for the built environment. Billions of sensors and devices now transmit real-world data to cloud computing systems in order to help us understand the physical world in quantifiable digital terms. IoT data is often sensitive in terms of privacy […]

Scandinavian design is a design movement characterized by simplicity, minimalism, democracy, and functionality that emerged from the five Scandinavian nations in the early 20th century and has flourished across the world since the 1950s. Scandinavian designers are known especially for household goods including furniture, textiles, ceramics, lamps, and glass, but the Scandinavian design phenomenon has […]

You can’t truly develop an industry without being able to define it. That has been the struggle of the smart buildings industry over the last decade or more, which is still unable to offer a truly standardised definition of what “smart” is. Without a proper definition, almost any building upgrade can be called smart for […]

This week, the 250-year-old UK department store Debenhams finally announced it would close all of its 178 outlets after nine months of struggle with the restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the US, the 118-year-old US department store J.C. Penney filed for bankruptcy in May 2020, just 2-months after the pandemic began. Business […]

Sensors are one of the fundamental elements of smart buildings. They provide the foundation of data collection that allows all Internet of Things (IoT) applications to function. The falling cost and reduced size of sensors has been a significant market driver. Now a rapidly maturing type of sensor offers a revolutionary drop in both size […]

“Coding is fundamental to literacy in the future,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. “We think coding should be required in every school because it’s as important as any kind of second language,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “In fifteen years we’ll be teaching programming just like reading and writing, and […]