©2025 This excerpt taken from the article of the same name which appeared in ASHRAE Journal, vol. 67, No. 2, February 2025.
Building Automation Systems: Let’s Get More From Our Building Graphics
By Brian Clark
Brian Clark is a research mechanical engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois
For decades, building automation systems have offered graphical user interfaces intended to help facility management understand and interact with their buildings. Despite improvements in the visual resolution of these building graphics, such as ultrarealistic HVAC icons or 3D piping schematics, the quality of information displayed to building operators has yet to significantly evolve. By applying what has been learned from the fields of information science and usability engineering, we can get much more from our building graphics.
It is often much easier to recognize a bad graphic than a good one. Poor building graphics may visually confuse, unnecessarily complicate or display flat repositories of raw information. Conversely, good graphics cleanly and quickly convey relevant insights to their users. When purposely designed as a series of interwoven and interactive displays, good graphics give a clear voice to our buildings. If bad graphics prompt the distracting question of “What is this screen trying to tell me?” then good graphics provide answers to the real questions:
- “What is happening in my building?”
- “What should be happening?” and
- “What can I do about it?”
Every building system has a story to tell about its operation, but through the lens of conventional building automation system (BAS) graphics, this story is often vague and meandering. Consider the first few moments of looking at a typical HVAC graphic—how long does it take you to find an operational problem?
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