From smart buildings to smart users
Résumé
This communication builds on field work conducted within the Live TREE project by two socioanthropologists
and philosophers at Lille Catholic University. Funded by the Region Hauts-de-France
(France), the Live TREE project’s objective is to conduct the university transition toward a sustainable
campus. It is part of the local implementation of the Third Industrial Revolution paradigm, and its flagship
realizations are two smart buildings hosting research, teaching and administrative functions. They are
meant as demonstrators of how sensors and IT coupled with renewable energies can and should pave
the way for a less carbon intensive future. Now that the buildings are operational, the engineers keep
wondering how to make “users” adopt the proper behaviors requested by the technological apparatus.
These buildings indeed tend to dictate behaviors and habits that go against common sense, and thus
call for a recomposition of their inhabitants’ intelligence. But engineers in charge of the project
conceive users after the building’s specs, and talk, somewhat reluctantly, of “smart users”, without whom
they risk having “just another fancy building stuffed with sensors”. What kind of intelligence is at stake
here? We want to explore and discuss questions such as how users are coproduced with the conception
of the building, how some categories of users are therefore favored or excluded from the building
(depending on gender, age, weight, etc.), and what does it say about how intelligence is conceived
in smart buildings. Smart buildings confronted with reluctant or just varied users are haunted by the risk of
being useless, as if the human component, that cannot be fine-tuned like other parameters, could ruin
its architecture anytime.