Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 5Intelligent Spaces and Smart Places

The One-Sentence Definition

Intelligent spaces and smart places are physical spaces – such as homes, office buildings, or even cities – that have been kitted out with technology to create an intelligent, connected environment.

What Are Intelligent Spaces and Smart Places?

There’s no doubt that our physical spaces are getting smarter. Our homes are now stocked with intelligent devices, such as smart speakers, that learn our behavior and preferences and react accordingly. But the trend for intelligent spaces extends far beyond our homes. Workplaces are becoming smarter. Entire buildings are being transformed into connected spaces that respond intelligently to the people who live and work inside. Even cities are becoming smart, thanks to initiatives like smart street lighting and intelligent traffic networks.

As a trend, intelligent spaces and smart places are inextricably linked with other trends in this book: artificial intelligence (AI, Trend 1), the Internet of Things (IoT, Trend 2), automation (Trend 13), autonomous vehicles (Trend 14), and advanced connectivity and 5 G (Trend 15). It’s the combination and acceleration of these advances that allows us to create spaces in which humans and technology interact in a more intelligent, connected, and automated way.

What does this mean in practice? A simple example is smart office lighting that comes on when workers are in the vicinity and turns off automatically when there’s no one ...