#60 - Digitizing buildings with Sun Ah Hwang
What if your home had a memory? What if your walls could speak?
What if your walls could speak? Not in whispers, but about its history with data & contextualized insights? That’s the world we dive into in this episode with PhD researcher Sun Ah Hwang.
Sun Ah is a grounded researcher working from Delft University of Technology, contributing to the Horizon Europe DEMO-BLog project. Her focus? Digital Building Logbooks (DBLs) — essentially, a health card for buildings. Imagine your heating system, insulation records, energy consumption patterns, and renovation history living together in one place — not hidden in a dusty drawer or locked behind bureaucratic systems, but accessible and actionable.
Together with Laurens, who’s also knee-deep in service design for these emerging platforms, Sun Ah unpacks how DBLs are quietly becoming key to Europe’s energy transition goals. From Belgium’s Woningpas to France’s CLEA, Scotlands’ Chimni, The Netherlands’ CIRDAX or Germany’s CAPSA.
We talk data ownership, renovation fears, DIY culture, and what it means to design services for systems that don’t fully exist yet. There’s a nerdy joy in exploring how a humble logbook can evolve into a real-time, data-driven dashboard — and what that means for architects, owners, tenants, governments, and designers alike.
For anyone interested in the intersection of buildings, policy, user empowerment, and design, this one’s for you. Tune in to find out how a niche research topic is gaining momentum — and how you might already be part of the story.
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