Healthy Building Feature Discovery & Development
My Role:
Strategy definition
Concept definition research
Insights management
Phases: Discovery, Definition & Implementation
Duration: 6 months
Date: Late 2020 - Early 2021
Background
As COVID-19 swept the nation, Carrier, the founder of modern air conditioning, hypothesized they had a role to play in making building occupants feel confident returning to indoor spaces.
Objective
Understand building owner and occupant needs related to healthy buildings to inform an innovative product concept for Carrier to increase occupant confidence in returning to indoor spaces.
Approach
Based on initial discovery research and concept testing with building occupants and operators, I wrote a proposal on strategic opportunities for Carrier to collaborate with the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) to increase occupant confidence in returning to buildings. This led to a collaboration with the IWBI to bring a solution to market, rooted in their science-backed healthy building standards.
Contextual Interviews & Concept Testing
Conducted broad research with building owners, operators (n=17) and occupants (n=520) to understand unmet needs related to healthy buildings.
Building Certification Partnership Opportunity
Based on secondary research of existing certifying bodies, I crafted 4 potential partnership opportunities and concepts for real-time air quality monitoring and certification.
Partnership Discussions & Score Development
Shared healthy building strategy and certification concept with IBWI and partnered to develop a feasible real-time scoring methodology based on the WELL Building Standard.
Score Definition Research
Conducted qualitative research with building owners and occupants to unpack detailed preferences for how the score is communicated and visualized, including language, level of detail, and visual style.
Results
Facility Manager Application
Outcome
Leveraging research-based insights, we aligned with IWBI on score visualizations and worked with IP/Legal to submit a patent for the scoring methodology and visuals.
Impact
Our air quality score became the hallmark feature of Carrier’s new IoT Smart Building platform. We partnered with our field offices to implement air quality sensors to enable the score in 10 buildings - with the potential to onboard 50 new buildings by the end of 2022.
On average, we’ve seen our customer’s scores improve by 2 points since implementation and have detected harmful volatile organic compound (TVOC) and radon issues at multiple sites.
Occupant Wallboards