New KTH Live-In Lab Director: Meet Marco Molinari

Hi Marco, what have you been doing before becoming Director of KTH Live-In Lab?

I have been a researcher at the KTH Department of Energy Technology since 2017 and I worked on the conceptualization and operation of the KTH Live-In Lab. During my postdoc at the ACCESS Linneaus Center I became part of a multidisciplinary research team on advanced building controls in one of the buildings of the KTH Campus, which, by coincidence, was right in front of where the Live-In Lab Testbed KTH and Testbed EM are right now.

What are you bringing to KTH Live-In Lab as Director?

In my career, I had the opportunity to work in teams with different backgrounds, which allowed me to understand the challenges and the strengths of multidisciplinary research. Many of the societal and sustainability challenges that we face today call for more multidisciplinary research. Many projects in the Live-In Lab stem from a bottom-up approach – interested researchers proposing projects. We have covered many of the relevant areas for sustainable developments of buildings and cities, but interconnections and opportunities among the projects have not been valued sufficiently. I believe that we can use innovative conceptual tools, like the Cyber-Physical-Human (CPH) model, to manage the complexity of smart buildings and cities through horizontal and cross-thematic research and foster more accessible communication.

KTH Live-In Lab has been around for a while, and developed in new directions. What is most important for the next two years?

Since its foundation, the KTH Live-In Lab has been good at bridging industry and academia, with researchers developing scalable solutions in collaboration with societal stakeholders. The value of the KTH Live-In Lab is not only in its unique infrastructure, but also in its ecosystem, made of human capital, the testbeds, the sensors and IT equipment available outside the testbeds, in addition to the galaxy of laboratories and centers at KTH and the partners and funding institutions. Over time, we have become excellent at solving three types of challenges: hard-to-develop problems, which typically require theoretical and applied research, hard-to-test problems, to mitigate liabilities and operational risks, and hard-to upscale problems, looking at complex and multifaceted challenges.

Three medium term actions are needed to keep growing in state-of-the-art research and societal impact. First, we need to increase the number and types of building testbeds: office spaces and neighborhoods are examples of new enabling experimental setup. Second, we have the potential to further diversify research; we spend the majority of our time indoors and living labs can be excellent experimental setups for monitoring residents’ health and to carry out more research in sociology, psychology and innovation business models. Third, the network of the Live-In Lab has an important expansion potential, creating synergies with KTH’s laboratories and centers and forming durable international partnerships with new building living labs in Europe.

What are the major trends and themes affecting the building sector right now?

Buildings have become smarter but there is a need for a better understanding of occupancy patterns, occupant behavior and wellbeing in buildings. Often poor ventilation and thermal comfort result in unexpected behavior from building users, for instance opening of the windows in the heating season to get fresh air. Advanced controls, fault detection and understanding of behavioral patterns can improve significantly the performance of buildings and wellbeing. The recent project DOCENT, financed from Rebygg, will develop and test occupant centric controls in the KTH Live-In Lab.

Building digital twins is another innovative area of research. Few examples of building digital twins exist, due to their complexity. The project and competence center Dig-IT Lab tackles the challenges with a multidisciplinary approach, targeting technical demonstration and scalability, organization challenges and regulations and laws related to the digital transformation in the building sector.

Finally, building living labs are emerging as an innovative approach for impactful research, and many universities and research centers are working towards the creation of living labs with different features. We have initiated a collaboration with existing building living labs with several European universities and research institutes. We believe that this collaboration has the potential to grow into a stable network for collaborative research and knowledge transfer.

How do these trends affect your projects and collaborations?

To make an impact in these emerging topics strong team work is essential.