Maintenance in Smart Schools

Benjamin Blackwell is a PhD student in the Manchester School of Architecture and an RA on the ‘Mapping spatial practices and social distancing in smart schools’ project

In the last two decades there has been increased attention on the maintenance of infrastructures. In STS and geography, it has often been pointed out that infrastructures are invisible until they breakdown (Star and Ruhleder, 1996): whilst they run smoothly they are taken for granted, and only become apparent when they no longer fulfill their desired functions. But when following maintenance workers – the concierge of apartment blocks (Strebel, 2011), the maintenance teams responsible for fixing and replacing signage on the Paris subway (Denis and Pontille, 2019), or the repair workers for serviced apartments (Bovet and Strebel, 2019) – it becomes clear that breakdown is not the exception but the ordinary state of things (Graham and Thrift, 2007) and that this ‘invisibility’ is relational (Denis and Pontille, 2019; Denis and Pontille, 2015).   

A LIDAR scan of a section of the school’s atrium

The same could very much be said of school buildings with maintenance needed to ensure that the school environment is safe, secure, and comfortable for students, teachers and supporting staff. In an interview with a member of the facilities team, they explained that everyday they travel throughout the building, checking that the shell of the room, the furniture, the temperature, the utilities, and the signage are all in good order. Yet they also mention the challenges that have arisen after the school moved from its previous, traditional building, to a ‘smart’ facility. In the previous facility, problems with heating could be resolved with a simple turn of a valve, in the new facility, ironically, despite all of its sensors and software meant to make it more responsive to the needs of its users, such a problem was far more complex to fix.  

It’s just that understanding, it becomes so much more complex, the systems where you have to input things, you have to monitor things all the time, and I think, obviously they’re set up by an engineer to start with, and unless you understand that programming and what they’re thinking about and how they’re looking at the system, it’s very difficult at first to understand what it is you’re doing. (Interview with facilities manager) 

In order to rectify this issue, they explained that when the engineer responsible for the system visits, he sits, watches and listens as the engineer works in order to learn about the system – slowly building an understanding of the complex system. Working together the facilities manager and the engineer work out how to rectify problems faced in the building. The facilities manager mentioned that the engineer attempts to ‘tailor’ the system to his needs, for example by building a ‘software switch’ to make certain tasks simpler. In a sense this demonstrates an attempt to build back into the ‘smart’ building some of the functionality of the old building.  

This relationship between facilities worker, engineer, and ‘smart’ system demonstrates the importance of considering the work of maintenance in the design and construction of ‘smart’ buildings. Such systems must consider the ability of facilities managers, such as the one in the school in which we are doing the research, to quickly and simply respond to problems when they inevitably arise.  

References 

Bovet, A., & Strebel, I. (2019). Job Done: What Repair Does to Caretakers, Tenants and Their Flats. In I. Strebel, A. Bovet, & P. Sormani (Eds.), Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality (pp. 89–125). Singapore: Palgrave macmillan. 

Denis, J., & Pontille, D. (2019). The Dance of Maintenance and the Dynamics of Urban Assemblages: The Daily (Re)Assemblage of Paris Subway Signs. In I. Strebel, A. Bovet, & P. Sormani (Eds.), Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality (pp. 161–185). Singapore: Palgrave macmillan 

Denis, J., & Pontille, D. (2015). Material Ordering and the Care of Things. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 40(3), 338–367. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243914553129 

Graham, S., & Thrift, N. (2007). Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954 

Star, S. L., & Ruhdler, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure : Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134. 

Strebel, I. (2011). The living building: towards a geography of maintenance work. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(3), 243–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.564732