According to Always Building, Herman Miller’s book about PE, “To achieve programmable environments, we think about a digital as well as physical dimension of space.” Integrating the digital dimension can make a building smarter, more efficient, and responsive to the people who use it.

With digital technology, you can easily manipulate the physical features of a space. And that changes the rules of the game because design is no longer about delivering a perfect finished product. It’s about marrying the digital and physical so that users can change in seconds what used to take weeks of planning and construction.

Instead of walls, there can be intelligent space division that is movable and adjusts acoustic performance as needed. Digital wallpaper morphs to suit your taste. Light sensors communicate with blinds and lights so they can automatically adjust according to users and conditions. A workspace adapts to the user’s preferences in music, air flow, temperature, and even chair adjustment.

So many possibilities. And the story is just beginning. Herman Miller knows it doesn’t have all the answers, so as they go forward with PE, they are consulting with the design profession, users, facility managers, and engineers. Together, they are transforming how buildings are designed, built, managed, and used.

Be part of the discussion. Let Herman Miller know your thoughts on PE. They love the input.

What if someone invented a simple, affordable device you quickly attach to your car to save you gas? Genius, right?

Well then, check this out. It’s Herman Miller’s new Energy Manager—a simple, affordable device you quickly attach to your Herman Miller systems furniture (new or retrofit) to save you electrical energy, 24/7.

Energy Manager is an easy solution to a major problem: A lot of energy and money is being wasted in facilities today. Chances are if you look around your facility, you’ll see too many workstations unoccupied for hours at a time with task lights, printers, computers, and chargers turned on, needlessly consuming energy, day and night.

That’s why Herman Miller developed Energy Manager. Part of the company’s Programmable Environments initiative, it makes your systems furniture smarter and it gives you more control over your environment.

Here’s how. Energy Manager controls two of the four circuits of power in a cluster of workstations. When a person sits down to work, an occupancy sensor detects their presence and turns on the devices in the cluster plugged into those two circuits. After the person leaves, the devices automatically turn off.

The results can be dramatic—and valuable to you and the environment. For example, take battery chargers that are always left on. Small potatoes, right? But 5% of energy is wasted on battery chargers not in use.

Energy Manager can also be connected to a Convia programmable gateway so it can measure and monitor occupancy data from every workstation—which workstations are occupied, when, and for how long during a day. Energy Manager uses this data to generate detailed occupancy reports that help you optimize floor plans to reduce real estate costs.   

Genius, right? The folks at Herman Miller’s LA showroom think so, too.

The nutshell idea for Programmable Environments (PE) is to use technology to fill new or existing buildings with intelligence. The building becomes a digital network so that permanent fixtures become adaptable. You can make them do exactly what you need them to do at any moment, change them instantly, and gather real time information about how they are used.

And it’s easy. Here’s the story:

In 2007, Herman Miller established a subsidiary called Convia, which serves as a platform for PE. Convia offers a modular electrical distribution system that can be programmed—a fundamental breakthrough in how power is distributed and managed in buildings. The Convia system enables the virtual “rewiring” of a room, floor, or building in just minutes.

With Convia, it’s simple to control energy consumption and ambient effects, including lighting, climate, acoustics, security, and data management. It’s like a digital nervous system that senses human presence, automatically generates appropriate responses, and provides reports that quantify performance, efficiency, and energy consumption and expenditure.

Those reports will show that you save energy and money. Convia controls typically cut electrical usage in half. As a result, Convia can help your project qualify for American Reinvestment and Recovery Act funds—in other words, stimulus money. Plus, Convia may contribute up to 23 points toward LEED Certification.

Convia is making buildings smarter all over the country, including the U.S. Green Buildings Council headquarters in Washington, DC—a showcase for resource-efficient, sustainable design.

Note: This is the first in a series of four posts on Programmable Environments.

You hear it all the time: “Technology has changed everything.” Well, duh. But it’s not totally accurate. There’s one part of our daily lives that’s largely untouched by the changes. It’s the buildings where we work and live—static, rigid, set in their ways.

While technology makes us faster, our buildings often hold us back. Unable to keep up with change—much less enable change—our buildings become out of sync with us.

So it’s no surprise that so many buildings stand empty and obsolete, destined for demolition. But even if a building is repurposed, it’s expensive to continually update the brick and mortar and the pipe and wire.

Herman Miller believes that by working together with architects, designers, and information technology leaders, they can design this problem away. So they started an initiative to help make it happen, called Programmable Environments (PE).

PE uses design and technology innovation to give people more control over their surroundings. With PE, we can program the features of a built environment to fit what we do and what we prefer. A space becomes as flexible as the Herman Miller furniture and seating in it. And we can save energy every day.

The promise of technology makes the potential of PE virtually unlimited. Herman Miller believes PE can fundamentally change how we design, build, and manage our places so they are more responsive, responsible, and sustainable.

To help you get to know PE, I’ll have more posts about it here on Discover over the next few weeks. For an overview, watch the video above. And you can get the complete story in a book by Herman Miller called Always Building: The Programmable Environment. It explains what PE is, what it can do for you, and the design potential it provides.