Akila brings a breakthrough to the management of built environments by realizing the optimization of building operations across their entire lifecycle. Cynthia Yuan, who leads Akila’s Engineering team, has been an instrumental part of that development through her BIM, design, and simulation expertise. We spoke with Cynthia about her career in engineering and green building design and her insights into the industry.

How would you describe your work at Akila?

I am responsible for digital engineering, including digital twins, engineering design, and related technical consulting. My primary focus is on BIM (Building Information Modeling) and the linkage between BIM and BAM (Building Assembly Modeling) in Akila’s “BIM, BAM, BOOM” approach to the building lifecycle.

What do you think of the changes that have occurred in the engineering design industry over the past few years?

In the future, the building process will achieve a “one model” approach like we have in advanced manufacturing industries by shifting from traditional two-dimensional drawings to three-dimensional designs, and then to the delivery of three-dimensional digital products without drawings.

How do you interpret the importance of BIM and digital twins and the interrelationship between them?

BIM is a basic framework for digital twins. It is not just a model, but a highly accurate database that records all the stages of the building process from design to construction. Digital twins are the key to managing this data. BIM facilitates the on-time delivery of building design and construction, management of budget shortfalls, and compliance with standards and requirements. Digital twins can help well-designed buildings achieve and exceed their intended purpose.

What simulations can your team currently offer?

We offer several different simulations based on BIM technology:

• Energy consumption: Used throughout the entire lifecycle of building design. We use building cooling/heating load calculations to select air-conditioning equipment, conduct energy consumption analyses of buildings when designing or renovating them, and optimize energy consumption through the development of models help to establish building management control modes to reach the maximum energy-saving potential of buildings.
• Comfort: This simulation is based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) technology and includes indicators for temperature, humidity, and wind speed, combining the outdoor and interior design of buildings with the goal of human comfort.
• Lighting environment: Lighting has a significant impact on the human mental state and psychological well-being. Excellent lighting design can improve comfort and reduce the energy consumption of lighting and air conditioning. The lighting environment simulation covers many aspects such as solargraph analysis, shading optimization design, and solar radiation intensity analysis. Its evaluation results provide conditions for targeted optimization of the scheme.
• Acoustic environment: This simulation set acoustic targets according to the different functions of the indoor environment, builds a model of the building’s acoustic environment by analyzing reverberation time and frequency response and optimizes the design plan as required by the acoustic target in a targeted manner to achieve the functional requirements of the building.
• Carbon emissions: Includes the assessment and calculation of the hidden carbon and operational carbon emissions generated throughout the project lifecycle, to reduce the environmental impact at the early design stage by optimizing materials, operation modes, and other technical means.

What is green building design?

Green buildings, also known as sustainable buildings, refer to high-quality construction that conserves resources, protects the environment, reduces pollution, and provides people with a healthy, suitable, and efficient space for use. It maximizes the harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature throughout its lifecycle. As the global climate and environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in recent years, it has become a consensus to develop a green economy and build an environmentally friendly society.

As a pillar industry of the national economy, construction plays an important role in economic development. Meanwhile, since construction projects consume a lot of resources and produce a large amount of waste, it has become a trend for construction projects to transform from a traditional high-consumption to a high-efficiency development approach, in which the promotion of green buildings is the key to achieving this change.

What do you think are the challenges of green building design compared with traditional building design?

Compared with traditional construction projects, green buildings emphasize the entire lifecycle. It requires that maximum resource conservation be considered from planning, design, and construction to post-operation and maintenance and even final demolition and recycling. The scope is broad, encompassing energy saving, land saving, water saving, and material saving; it attaches importance to protecting the environment and reducing pollution, focusing on low consumption, high efficiency, economy, environmental protection, integration, and optimization.

Compared with traditional construction projects, green building practices place higher demands on various aspects including technology, management, and economic performance. First, as far as technology is concerned, green buildings require the efficient application of architectural design principles, plumbing, and HVAC technologies.

Meanwhile, in terms of management, unlike the traditional model where projects are divided into phases and each phase is completed by different project parties, green buildings require the collaboration of every aspect of the project lifecycle and the various business departments involved, emphasizing the continuity of the project cycle, its integrity, and the comprehensive nature of its objectives.

Moreover, the cost is an essential factor that limits the realization of green building projects. As the technology and concept of green building in China are not mature enough at this stage, the functional and economic positioning of the buildings cannot be well balanced, which is mainly reflected in the fact that the implementation cost of new technology used in green buildings is higher than its economic benefit.

The technical integration of professional collaboration, the overall control of the project lifecycle, and the balance between building positioning and economic performance are the main challenges that distinguish green buildings from traditional projects at the present stage.

As the era of Construction 4.0 has arrived, what is your outlook on the future trend of the industry?

Building productization is a trend in the transformation of the construction industry. With the increasingly widespread application of green building technology and the advancement of the entire construction industry, the goal of sustainable buildings and cities is being realized. We make full use of BIM technology to integrate scientific control, intelligent construction, industrialized construction, and green construction to ensure safety, high quality, and timely construction. In addition, building productization reduces pollution, conserves resources, and reduces costs and carbon emissions while improving production efficiency.

Shanghai, China — Akila has appointed Anna Dai as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Under Ms. Dai’s leadership, Akila will accelerate its output of top-notch technological innovation.

Over the past 20 years, Ms. Dai has been working with leading prop-tech companies and achieved great success with Reinvent Ventures, WeWork, Blackboard, and Autodesk. She has built a career in engineering management and product development and is especially skilled at driving organizational transformation in an agile and multicultural environment.

As the new CTO of Akila, Ms. Dai will oversee the building of a more robust and people-centric software development team and the development of value-driven solutions that decarbonize the built environment and optimize ESG reporting.

“Having Ms. Dai onboard opens a new chapter of Akila’s development. Her profound knowledge in prop-tech and engineering will take Akila’s technological capability and product excellency to the next level and help her prepare for fast expansion on the international markets,” commented Philippe Obry, Akila Co-Founder and General Manager, “but what is more impressive to us is Ms. Dai’s passion and determination to combat climate change through innovations, which is perfectly in line with Akila’s mission and vision. We are excited to have her join our team and pass her personal values and impact not only on our team but also on our clients and partners.”

Anna Dai noted, “Twenty years working in prop-tech and software has given me the chance to see so much exciting evolution in the space. When I learned about Akila, I felt I had a truly unique opportunity to apply all of these lessons at an unprecedented scale, covering the whole scope of the built environment, with a maximum positive impact on the environment and human wellness.”

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Behind every great product and user experience, there is a designer. Wilfred Leung, our Director of Product Design has driven this process since he joined Akila in 2020. From foundation to product launch and expansion, Wilfred has been instrumental in shaping the user experience, functionalities and technological capabilities of the platform, as well as playing a leading role in the development of Akila’s modules.

We spoke to Wilfred about his career in Product Design and SaaS, as well as the user considerations that went into the development of Akila.

How would you describe what you do in one sentence?

I design solutions to business problems, challenging stereotypes and merging capabilities from different technologies, always focusing on good user experience and design.

How did you get into product design?

Even when I was a kid, I remember being fascinated by different products around me, and wondering why they worked the way they did, why they looked the way they did. So, by university time, it was a no-brainer to study product and industrial design.

I started out in industrial design of consumer electronics for a multinational in Singapore. I felt good about the work – we won a RedDot award and I even secured 13 utility and design patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office. But, I wanted to really explore fully digital products, and I was attracted to the energy and speed that you get in the startup world. So, I jumped at a chance to work for a US retail tech startup based in Shanghai and to design digital products for online to offline retail. From there, I spent time in some other industries like MedTech, but all of my work has remained focused on digital products.

What attracted you to working with Akila?

Well, the seed was actually planted even before Akila started. I attended a summer design research program at UN City in Copenhagen a few years ago. Everything was based around the framework of the UN Sustainable Development goals (SDGs) and the call to “design for a better world” – the idea being that if we actually want to achieve the SDGs, we need to totally rethink the way products and services are designed. But what the program made me realize was that designing a better world cannot be led by designers alone. They will need support from many actors.

This is exactly why Akila was so attractive to me when I first learned about it. I saw how all the services in Akila could make a very evident and transparent contribution to SDGs by helping companies provide information on a certified system for sustainability management.

As a designer, I felt I finally had the opportunity to turn theory into practice.

So what was the biggest UX design consideration when you were designing Akila?

One of the key UX design considerations is to create consistency for the users. When consistency is present, users who add new applications in Akila can transfer knowledge to new applications and learn new features quickly without pain. This way, they can focus on executing the task and not have to learn how the product UI works every time they switch applications with Akila.

Another consideration is about understanding the user. Designing for professionals includes understanding the job context, their workflow, work environment, problems and current solutions. UX designers need to empathize with the end user’s mindset.

This will allow us to build impactful features that are needs-based and persona-driven.

What are the differences between designing a B2B SaaS and a B2C SaaS product?

As UX designers, we work on products for mainly two different groups of users: professionals (B2B) and private users (B2C).

For B2C products, users tend to download these apps for personal use. Many B2C SaaS products tend to focus on entertainment, health, communication and social media. The focus is often on ease of use, differentiation from competing products, and sleek aesthetics.

B2B apps or platforms have a lot more functional complexity. The platforms tend to collect and display large amounts of data, and support multiple user roles, permissions and management operations. There is also collaboration and integration between the different types of users.

As such, professional users of B2B products tend to have much higher requirements for flexibility, efficiency, control and freedom in the use of the product than private users. Since they most often use the product regularly in their work, the user experience can be greatly improved by the so-called quick access buttons such as widget shortcuts.

What are the latest SaaS product design trends that you are most excited about?

Without a doubt, artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important innovative technologies that is bringing disruptive change to the SaaS model that I am most excited about working on right now.

Together with interactive experiences with the digital twin – a virtual representation of real-world machines and processes – and artificial intelligence (AI) will be the pillars of product design innovation, accessibility, and personalization.

Mark Bawtree has joined Akila as Head of Global Sales & ESG. With 18 years of executive experience working with cutting-edge renewable technologies for decarbonizing the world, Mark is committed to supporting clients in achieving carbon reduction targets and ESG goals.

We sat down with Mark to talk about his understanding of ESG and his mission to make buildings and cities better for the people and the environment.

How did you get involved in the world of ESG?

It was very much grassroots and, in hindsight, a natural progression with the requirements in the market. I was handling clients looking at Green Building Certifications, IoT building monitoring, sustainable materials and Energy Auditing. Many times my clients had a lot of great ideas and projects around sustainability, but no real overall strategy and visibility on what they really should be striving towards. So we started to ‘audit’ their activities, creating a GAP analysis to enable the key stakeholders to visualize what was happening across the organization in line with their peers and international standard of scopes. We could then support our clients in setting targets and creating short, medium and long-term plans for the implementation of actions to achieve them.

What’s your mission at Akila?

To keep it simple my mission is to educate and support all our clients in the power of data for enabling informed decision making, creating cost savings, and achieving decarbonization targets for their buildings.

What have you learned from your past work that could be applied to Akila?

I have 18 years of technical sales for sustainable and renewable cutting-edge technologies, primarily looking at helping my clients to solve problems, which many times combined educating and close development to provide the solution needed to achieve their targets. I believe all of these aspects enable me to support solutions-based sales using the Akila system to reduce the impact of buildings on the environment.

For you, what is the most exciting thing about digital twin, and Akila specifically?

Apart from a Digital twin looking cool, what blew me away when I was first introduced to Akila was how cross-functional the platform which makes it incredibly powerful when tied into real-time performance and control of the building. This allows Akila to run a wide range of simulations to look at a targeted solution for improvements in the operations of each building. Then once implemented in the physical building either through automated control or improved operational performance Akila can show the impact of those changes either in cost savings and/or carbon reduction.

What is the biggest misunderstanding about ESG? And what would you tell people to correct it?

The general belief is that ESG is incredibly complicated as it touches so many aspects of an organization, and it can seem that way, as not one solution fits all. In fact, it is actually very straightforward. It just requires organizations to start on their journey by initially establishing a framework around their existing ESG activities and identifying what they want to achieve with a structured strategy with short to long-term goals.

With people spending 90% of their time indoors, one of the simplest short-term goals for decarbonization and energy reduction is to fully understand how an organization’s buildings operate to be able to optimize the operations and improve thermal comfort levels.

What’s on top of your agenda in the coming months?

Well, I have definitely jumped into the deep end here, which while scary is very exciting at the same time. So due to the number of competencies of the Akila system, I believe the coming months for me to really build my, the team’s and our client’s understanding of all the benefits of the Akila system and how the system can support our ESG goals not just at the beginning, but throughout the whole journey of decarbonization.