The 2030 Control Room July 2011

David Brooker, Paul Reynolds & Anne-Marie Martin

The Future is notoriously difficult to predict…

A prediction

A reality

Global Issues:

• Population Growth

• Climate Change

• Pollution

• Food Shortages

• Rising Fuel Costs

In order to understand the control room of 2030, we need to understand what the room will be controlling.

Many people commute long distances to their place of work. Public transport is often overcrowded, expensive and stressful to use.

Some cities are now gridlocked because of the volume of traffic.

It no longer makes sense to take the people to the work. Taking the work to the people will save energy and reduce pollution. It will also improve our quality of life.

It no longer makes sense to grow food in remote locations and transport it hundreds or thousands of miles.

Food will be produced locally and matched to requirements. It will be intensively grown in dedicated buildings using hydroponics – a method of growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions in water without soil and fertilizers.

The growing conditions will be tightly controlled and monitored.

The industrial revolution is over, but it has given us the tools to build a new form of society…

This new society will consist of communities that follow the role model of medieval towns and villages, where housing and food production were clustered around the foot of a castle.

It will not be a castle at the hub of these new communities however – it will be a control room.

Each hub will be linked to a Regional Control Centre that will be responsible for crisis management, mediation, data analysis and master planning.

Roads are expensive to maintain and private cars will no longer be viable. A monorail network for freight and passengers will link the hubs.

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The service will be fast and reliable. The rails will be elevated and heated – so there will be no problems with ‘leaves on the line’ or ‘the wrong kind of snow’.

Aircraft for long distance travel will be more fuel efficient and much quieter. Vertical take-off and landing will do away with the need for runways. Airports will be located within the centres of the Regional Hubs, rather than on the outskirts as they are today. The 2030 Control Room will include air traffic control as part of its transport management functions.

The new control centres will form the focal point of the community with a number of services and commercial enterprises clustered around them.

The clustering of services and commercial enterprises around the control centre will enable a variety of functions to be co-located within the control room for greater operational efficiency.

Most towns and cities evolve over a period of time, with modern buildings sitting alongside historic ones.

Many historic buildings are listed because they are an important part of a nation’s heritage.

When a building ceases to fulfil its role, it is not always easy to find it a new one.

The control rooms of 2030 will be predominantly housed within redundant heritage and iconic buildings.

This will preserve our architectural heritage and provide cost and energy savings through the recycling of buildings rather than their demolition and replacement.

An example of how a 2030 Control Room would be accommodated within a heritage structure.

Lloyds Building Interior

Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester, located within an Edwardian Cotton Exchange

The heritage and iconic buildings of today will not meet the energy efficiency requirements for buildings in 2030. It will also become increasingly expensive to maintain the building exteriors.

These problems will be overcome by encasing the buildings in “glass boxes” to provide thermal insulation and weather protection. In this way contemporary architecture can be used to preserve traditional architecture.

The glass used to encase the buildings will be photovoltaic, as will the glass used for the sky farms and other new structures. The generation of electricity through the use of photovoltaic glass will be supplemented by other green forms of energy generation such as wind turbines and tidal energy. The new control centres will monitor and control these local energy generation sources.

System monitoring will, for the most part, be automated. The main human activities in the 2030 control room will be call-taking and system intervention when something goes wrong. This will place incident management at the heart of the control room.

A Typical 2030 Control Room Plan

The development of OLED technology will have a significant impact on the design of the 2030 Control Room.

The polymer films which make up OLEDs are very thin and flexible and do not need a rigid substrate. It will be possible to manufacture overview monitors that are large scale, full height, single units.

OLEDs operate at very low currents and have a refresh rate 1,000 times faster than LCD, giving fluid, clearer full-motion video.

It is already possible to manufacture OLED displays that are 75% transparent when turned off. Universal Display Corporation in New Jersey and others are developing see-through conductive materials to replace the last visible part: the grid of circuits that delivers power to the pixels.

When they are not displaying critical information, natural landscapes can be used as screensavers to provide a psychological link with the external environment. These images can be dimmed with the onset of darkness.

The luminance range of OLEDs is far greater than human perception. Displays can brighten or dim while maintaining image contrast, shadows and highlights.

An example of an overview-screen alert.

The control room of 2030 will serve the community. It will be “Dixon of Dock Green” rather than “Big Brother.”

Movable screens between each operational segment will provide acoustic privacy between groups. These will consist of panels with a sandwich construction and a perforated translucent covering layer. The honeycomb structure of the panels will adjust the resonance of the room to reduce the noise level.

Colour will be used to identify the different operational segments.

The Incident Response Zone will also be used for staff briefings and also provides break-out spaces.

The units between each area will incorporate acoustic screens, shared equipment and welfare facilities such as chilled water.

The units will be manufactured of Hi-MACS®, a solid surface material composed of 70% natural stone powder, 25% acrylic resin and 5% natural pigments. The product provides a non-porous, smooth surface that can be easily thermo-plastically moulded into three-dimensional shapes. It has almost the same strength as stone, but can be worked with and fabricated in the same way as wood.

Example of Hi-MACS Installation (ALV Showroom, Milan)

The units have been designed in two halves so that the movable acoustic screens can be slid between them. The entire unit is constructed of Hi-MACS, so that the storage units appear to be an integral part of the structure.

Holograms will be used extensively in the incident response zone – for video conferencing and for such things as group examination of 3D images of buildings and plant equipment.

Flexible e-ink screens, as easy on the eyes as newsprint, will wirelessly grab the documents you need when you enter a meeting. (Currently under research development by Dutch Company Polymer Vision).

The Incident Control Zone is on a raised platform that can be rotated. It will also be possible to separately rotate the supervisor desks so that they can be grouped differently in response to an incident.

At the centre of this zone there is a transparent glass lift that also serves as a viewing pod. The pod can also be rotated, providing visitors with a panoramic view of the control room.

The Control Room of 2030 will also be used as a broadcast studio. With the supervisor desks acting as presenter desks and the overview monitors at the room perimeter providing an appropriate backdrop and content.

As well as broadcasting items of national interest, the facilities will also be used to provide information to the community the Control Room serves.

OLED technology will allow the manufacture of large scale, energy efficient, light-emitting ceiling panels.

These panels will provide a psychological link with the outside world by emulating natural daylight during the day, and dimming down and providing a warmer light as darkness falls.

The structural framework that forms the ceiling of the Control Room will be manufactured of a “smart material.”

Ductal ®, for instance, is an Ultra-High Performance Fibre Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC) which can be cast in large thin panels with an outstanding level of surface finish detail.

The ceiling structure will be perforated so that it provides a return air path for the room’s displacement ventilation system.

Acoustics 1

The structural framework to the ceiling will be designed as a cellular structure so that it acts as a porous sound absorber. As air flows into it, sound energy will be converted into heat.

A polymer such as polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) could be combined with the Ultra-High Performance Fibre Reinforced Concrete to provide an acoustically “smart ceiling.” PVDF is a piezoelectric actuator which will excite the structural and acoustic phases of the ceiling framework when a low level electric current is passed through it. This would generate a secondary acoustic field which destructively interacts with the acoustic field created by the primary noise source.

Further sound attenuation will be provide by the OLED screens that form the perimeter overview monitors and the illuminated ceiling panels, which will act as panel absorbers. (These are non-rigid, non-porous materials which are placed over an air space that vibrates in a flexural mode in response to sound pressure exerted by adjacent air molecules).

Acoustics 2

Security

There will be no more fumbling with passwords, ID cards or keys. Cameras will snap photos as control room operators walk into the building, compare them to a database of users, and unlock equipment, doors and personal data. Retina scans or voice recognition technology may also be used in the same way.

Furniture

Back to the drawing board…

The drawing board is one of the most ergonomically designed pieces of furniture created. It is height adjustable, enabling the user to sit or stand, and the worksurface can be horizontal or tilted at an angle.

The “drawing board” surface will be a large touch screen. This new i-station or i-desk will be used in conjunction with a wireless headset. There will be a docking station for the operator’s i-phone so that personal data can be readily accessed from the one screen.

The i-desk can also be used as a shared working surface for project groups.

Wilkhahn InteracTable MILK Classic Desk

The evolution of the workstation into the i-desk…

The i-desk

The i-desk will have the same adjustability as a drawing board, but it will be electrically operated.

The populations of many of the developed nations are becoming increasingly obese. Whilst this problem will eventually be overcome by changes to diet and attitudes to physical exercise – obesity will still be with us in 2030.

Control room chairs for 24/7 use are currently tested for users up to 150 kilograms in weight. In 2030, control room chairs will need to be larger and more robust.

Task chairs will be more sophisticated, automatically adjusting themselves to the user’s weight and posture. Office furniture makers Herman Miller and Humanscale, for instance, are already investing significant research money on designing such chairs.

Meeting chairs should provide proper lumbar support and be comfortable enough to be used for long meetings. They should have a breathable fabric to the seat pad and back; and the seat pad should have a rounded front edge. Because of these performance requirements, the meeting chairs of the 2030 Control Room will probably be similar to those we use today, albeit with some further design enhancements.

Some of the chair designs of the 20th century have become iconic and are still manufactured today. One example is the Aluminium Chair, designed by Ray and Charles Eames in 1958. It still looks contemporary, especially with the introduction of a Netweave fabric for the upholstery. In 2030, we have assumed that there will be further design enhancements to the chair, and it will also be available in a wider range of finishes.

Control room operators in 2030 will be highly skilled and multi-disciplined.

Control room operators in 2030 will be highly skilled and multi-disciplined.

They will alternate between front-line tasks and control room tasks. Some staff may only work two or three shifts a week in the control room.

Shifts will be shorter – 4 to 6 hours rather than 8 or 12.

Working in a control room environment will no longer be a sedentary task. The 2030 Control Room will be a dynamic and interactive experience that will feel like being inside the computer rather than sat facing it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0eCJqEVKNQ&feature=related

CCD Design & Ergonomics Ltd95 Southwark Street | London | SE1 0HX

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www.ccd.org.uk