“Let’s not get caught up in AR, VR, ‘in the cloud’, all those buzzwords,” says Matthew Marson, head of smart places at WSP, in the latest three-part series of Building podcasts. 

That is the problem with jargon: it becomes an easy shortcut for people in the know but then gets picked up more widely until it’s so over-used that the original meaning is lost, the concepts become less defined and our understanding is less clear. 

Marson is talking about how the word “smart” is increasingly being applied to buildings, often without justification. There is nothing new in applying technology to design, build and operate a building, so when can a building genuinely be described as smart? And has our obsession with whizz-bang technology led some of us to forget the needs of the end-user? 

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