Becken Holding: Sustainable usage behaviour in offices
In the Cross Innovation Class, a team of students worked with Becken Holding to develop a solution to promote sustainable usage behaviour in office buildings.
The challenge
If real estate, together with the construction industry, contributes around 40% to carbon dioxide emissions worldwide and buildings in Germany are responsible for around a third of CO2 emissions - then more smart solutions need to be found to reduce the carbon footprint. Becken Holding GmbH is therefore tackling the following challenge in the Cross Innovation Class:
Considerable resources (especially energy) are wasted because office users do not behave sustainably. The need for action is particularly clear in view of the proportion of office buildings in our cities and the associated high number of employees. As of 2018, around 15 million people were employed in offices in Germany, which accounts for almost ⅓ of all people in employment in the country*. This means there is impressive potential for a sustainable transformation.
The team therefore set itself the challenge of how the behaviour of office users can be made more sustainable and resource-efficient. The focus was to be on people in particular.
Output
The result is the development of the POWER PLANT, including the associated website. The Power Plant - "the green office power station" - is a mechanical plant that can be placed on any desk or in a central location in the office. The Power Plant measures sustainable behaviour and makes it visible by letting the leaves of the stylised plant hang down in the event of careless behaviour in the office (energy is wasted) and putting up its leaves in the event of resource-conserving behaviour.
In the prototype version, the Power Plant is linked to ultrasonic distance sensors that transmit the recorded data to a central server. The motion detectors record how many people enter and leave a room - when the last employee leaves the room, an acoustic signal is emitted to remind employees to switch off all energy-consuming devices. POWER PLANT documents the collected data on a connected website in a dashboard and in a tree graphic that behaves in the same way as a mechanical plant. The visualisation of behaviour creates incentives - office use is given a sense of purpose through visibility and indirect rewards, and sustainable, resource-saving behaviour can be established.
A further reward system can be introduced to promote resource-conserving behaviour. For example, companies can publish their successes and milestones on the POWER PLANT website and share them with other companies. Commitments to local environmental protection and sustainability projects can also be published there.
Team Becken won the audience award of the Cross Innovation Class 2021 with the POWER PLANT at the closing event.
Students: Enya Heiden (Urban Planning, HCU), Jan Lucas Tschirner (Media Informatics, FH Wedel), Henrik Zabel (Computer Science, FH Wedel), Patrycja Radkiewicz (Interior Design, AMD), Leoni Decker (Product Design, AMD), Luis Samstag (Product Design, AMD)
Company: Nina Binné, Pascal Kehrer
"We have taken on a challenge as a partner at Class 2021 that will keep our company busy in the long term, and the collaboration with the students and the results far exceed our expectations"
Format & method
In the Cross Innovation Class, students from three to six different universities work in interdisciplinary teams on the practical challenges of the project partners.
- The process follows the logic of design thinking: in iterative feedback loops with the partners, the teams approach a solution step by step.
- The entire process is managed by the Cross Innovation Hub team and supported by trained facilitators.
- Prototypes can be created and tested in the workshops of the partner universities.
Cross Innovation Class #3 took place in the summer semester 2021 on the topic of Urban Tech/Smart City Solutions.
Our partner: Basins
Becken is a Hamburg-based property company that also has an impact beyond the Hanseatic city. Its business areas include asset management, project development for new construction projects, retail space management and property investment management.
