Katerra Smart Building Platform

Katerra Cloud provided a single unified platform to support the entire building lifecycle. Planning. construction, commissioning, and deployment and more are all managed through the same interface.

My Role

Principal Architect of Product Design, Project Lead, Interaction Design Contributor

The Challenge

The Goal

In the typical construction and deployment process, many completely different systems are involved at each step of the process. Katerra's goals of transformational change in the industry required a massive increase in efficiency.

To create a single platform that could manage all aspects of the creation of a smart building, along with it's eventual deployment and management.

The Beginning

Intelligent buildings require a level of management that spans across many areas that usually exist in isolation. Katerra's advanced construction methods, and AI driven processes coupled with a vast array of connected devices and sensors enabled a level of integration beyond any competing toolset. Before beginning on the design it was important to understand all capabilities and regulations along with having a clear understanding of all the processes required in the building process. This was converted into hundreds of use cases that were used to create and overall IA map that would drive design.

Due to the wide variety of modules that would be needed, a foundation design was created that included global elements along with a set of easily swapable components.

The Design

The overall platform needed to support a huge number of screens and forms. Below is a small sample of what was included.

A single user administration portal provides the ability to manage thousands of users across multiple sites with different configurations and with varied levels of permission.

The Campus settings module provides the ability to edit campus and building metadata used throughout the platform.

The vast array of connected devices and sensors could be monitored and managed from the site level down to the individual unit.

Detailed flows were created for any multi step process. This covered a wide range of functionality ranging from basic user administration to modifying environmental settings at the unit level.

The platform also provided a single system to deploy firmware to connected devices ensures that migrations to new software can be handled efficiently and with maximum visibility. This system provided the ability to target firmware deployments with complete control over granularity.

To support installers, technicians and mobile staff, an iOS iPad version was created alongside the web version. The iPad supported additional offline functionality needed by installers during building commissioning.

This is a demonstration of device management capabilities.

Improving the efficiency of device installation leads to massive savings over the course of provisioning a full building with thousands of smart devices.

The Result

The Katerra Smart Building Platform succeeded in streamlining the entire management of Katerra's construction process. It was originally deployed to Katerra's Project Perfect project prior to mass adoption.