Hogeschool Inholland Amsterdam becomes SMART campus

  In 2022, the new Sluis neighborhood in Amsterdam will be home to the college of the future. Manager Education & Research Peggy van Schijndel and IT Solution Architect Raymond Kales explain how this will take shape. How do you create a contemporary Smart building in which sustainability and effectiveness go hand in hand? What do the various users want, who are they, what are the effects, and last but not least where do you start?" Peggy: "We want to be in the middle of society and connect our education with issues from our surroundings such as the environment, tourism, sustainable living, transportation and IT. Therefore, we desperately need the city to make our education. The coloring of the school and study becomes local in this way and that is exciting for an organization. You enter into a different dynamic. Neighbors and students were often not included in this kind of change process. Now it is our starting point. We will literally open spaces in the neighborhood soon. We're going to be very approachable." ICT or facilities? "Our goal is to create sustainable and long-term housing," says Raymond Kales. "That's an interesting challenge. We want to develop a SMART campus, but what is that really? What will such a property do for us? That's what we've been researching. We visited several SMART buildings owned by partners, including Microsoft. The first question we asked ourselves was whether it is an ICT or a facilities issue. And what do we address? Security, heating, lighting...? Right now the cards in the SMART market are not yet shuffled. There are a lot of great new products, but we don't want to bet on a horse that may not be there next year because it has been competed to death or bought up by a big party." Sensors Based on our findings, we chose to fully equip the building with sensors, in addition to the WIFI network, among other things. In this way we collect an awful lot of data from the users, which we store in our own database and can then use for various purposes. The sensors measure heat, light intensity, noise, traffic flow, indoor navigation and human occupancy, among other things. Via a smartphone app, users can search for a quiet spot in the building and indicate preferences to create the desired comfort, or view occupancy levels. We want to make these data available to everyone. In this way, they can contribute to innovation projects or graduation projects. Users can see where fellow students and teachers are. Privacy is a new issue here that we need to address. In the future we want to look at more user functions so that, for example, people from outside the college can use places like 'Spaces' does. Organizing occupancy is now done by scheduling agencies, but in the future, as automatic scheduling, it can also be integrated into the system. The sustainability aspect is well reflected in the consumption of energy. When rooms are not in use, lighting and heating are automatically turned off." From the group of participants in the breakout session come interesting contributions such as focusing on health (the classic pedometer) or measuring concentration in combination with brightness of lighting and temperature, for example. This kind of data can be valuable. Hogeschool Inholland will be ready in 2022 and probably with many more sustainable IT applications that we do not know yet.