Technology ought not to be an end in itself, but rather a means - but for what? According to Gui Perdrix, Founder of Art of Co and Director of Co-Liv, it facilitates human connection. In this article, he shares unique stories and sharp insights into how technology can achieve this aim, while providing an abundance of new and innovative ways of enhancing the coliving experience. Whether in today or tomorrow’s world, Gui shows us that coliving is ready to experience a radical shift in the way we use and experience our spaces.

‍

When I got asked to write an article on how technology can enhance the coliving user experience, I asked myself: what topics are currently not discussed in depth and need more attention?

Technology has become a fundamental part of coliving. Frontrunners such as Christian Schmitz, who runs the Co-Liv Tech Community, have already brought up many ways in which coliving can benefit from technology. To date, the coliving industry is being filled with information around how to use technology for operations. The most common themes are:

• How to embed technology throughout the entire customer journey,
• How technology can help operators reach operational excellence.
• And which solutions exist regarding resident booking, room management, energy management, resident communication and house management.

Proptech is a hot topic, leading many entrepreneurs to start new ventures and influencing many operators to build their own solutions. For example, ECLA coliving, a mixture of student and professional housing with a total of more than 1,000 beds in a suburb of Paris, created their own application that handles literally everything: from using lockers and printers, booking the cinema room, using the washing machine (plus letting you know how many machines are free and when they have finished), booking the music studio and basketball court and showcasing electricity bills. ECLA is an example of how operators invest into building technological systems to optimise operations.

But technology can, will and should go further than simply optimising operations. It has the potential to influence something more profound that matters the most in coliving: human dynamics.

This is why today, I am going to share the three main topics that are underrated in the field of technology and coliving. At the end of this article, you will leave with a different perspective on technology, pathways to innovation and hopefully new ideas for your coliving business.

‍

1. THINKING TECHNOLOGY: USING TECH TO FACILITATE HUMAN INTERACTION

As a systems thinker, my first question regarding technology has to be: why technology?

Technology is a means to an end. And I’d like to claim that its end in coliving is increasing the amount of qualitative human interactions.

As I’m writing this piece, I’m currently coliving in Guatemala with Max Stossel, who co-founded the Center for Human Technology, a movement that promotes technology which helps humans live by their values. In his poetic video “This Panda is Dancing” (Youtube), his words describe it best:

“Or should you build digital tools so advanced that can actually enhance the world outside the device in our hands? Can you add so much value that it lets us put our phones back in our pants as fast as we possibly can. Not time-sucking, but ‘time giving’ innovation. That’s what it means to be truly technologically advanced. Future is not all screen. It’s humanity in hands.”

If we think about technology from this perspective in coliving, then it leads to the next question: what can we create that will give people actual, real quality time to bond in relationships and as a community?

The goal of technology is not to optimise human procedures, but rather to optimise the procedures that are not bringing out the best of our time spent being human. It’s not about replacing the community manager - it’s about allowing the community manager to spend their time on activities that technology can’t do at all.

Let me share with you two examples that struck me in the coliving scene, when I visited 50+ coliving spaces back in 2019 during my coliving world tour.

Pushing it to the extreme, coliving operator Venn decided to test something new. The operator runs several buildings in Brooklyn that are all within walking distance of one another, yet not located directly next door. Each building has a common area accessible to all Venn members, but you need a key or card to enter the building.

Growing up on a kibbutz in Israel, the founders got used to having open doors, which creates a feeling of familiarity and trust. How could they recreate the same feeling within the city, knowing they were located in neighborhoods not known for being the safest?

This is when they combined their vision of open doors with smart locks. In their new app, they developed
a feature that recognises Venn members when they’re located in front of Venn buildings, and this automatically unlocks the door, so a member can enter without having to unlock anything first. This is just one example of how technology can be used to have people spend less time in everyday life logistics while creating a feeling of home.

Another story comes from The Archive in San Francisco. In this thirty-person commune, residents had a hard time knowing when people would be hanging out in the living room, so they asked themselves how they could trigger more moments of human connection.

The solution was simple: they linked the Amazon ordering button with a Raspberry pie chip (a simple computer processing power to which you can give commands), and they hung it at the entrance of the living room.

What happened? Every time someone clicked on the button before entering the room, it triggered a message on their interior communication channel (Slack), stating “Hangout time! Someone’s in the living room!” Simple, but efficient - an indirect invitation that someone would like to be joined.

Ask yourself, therefore, the following question: what technology could I implement in order to facilitate encounters? This is your chance to use technology in a positive way.

Let’s now talk about a concrete technological means that is underestimated: chatbots.

‍

2. CHATBOTS: OPTIMISING OPERATOR-RESIDENT RELATIONSHIPS

This past November, I spent the lockdown in France with some of my core friends in a last-minute self- organised pop-up coliving space.

One of them, Marjolaine Grondin, is the CEO of France’s largest Facebook chatbot Jam (700k
users) and we decided to create a chatbot for the house. It was called Louis, and you can try it out by clicking here (you need to be logged in via Facebook Messenger).

We started adding tasks that were specific to our needs - for example, the ability to add an item to the shopping list, to communicate friction points to the head of the community, to communicate that something is broken in the house or to send compliments to another member of the house.

Chatbots are underrated and there are few examples of truly automated communication systems. These systems, based on language processing or often simple input-output commands, have a tremendous advantage: they can help residents with a majority of the problems that community managers currently have to handle.

To date, most of the current ‘community apps’ are not optimised to specific coliving needs such as “adding things to the grocery list” or “going through a process to facilitate conflict”.

In chatbots, technology could be used in several ways: to manage resident consumption, promote and facilitate the organisation of events and activities and to give a platform for members to connect and get to know one another, communicate with one other and make communal decisions.

Here are the main areas in which chatbots can help coliving spaces, broken down into the following features:

1. Onboarding residents: teaching new residents the rules of the space, explaining community values and onboarding on day-to-day advice 
2. Operational excellence: letting management know that something is broken in the house
3. Health of community: communicating friction points, giving compliments
4. Communication to Residents: announcements from the operator to residents
5. Decision making: community-related decisions such as voting on communal budget or on the next event

At Art of Co, we’ve been thinking about taking the idea of chatbots further and are working with current operators to develop an all-in-one solution to these scenarios. If you’re interested in contributing or applying chatbots to your space, please reach out!

‍

3. IOT: AN OPPORTUNITY TO GET FASTER FEEDBACK LOOPS

One last sector of innovation is everything related to connected items within the space, or rather, the so- called Internet of Things (IoT). The main advantage of IoT would be faster feedback loops between what happens within a space and the ideal case scenario that an operator is seeking.

For example, a trash bin could be connected to a small detector that would count how many hours the bin doesn’t close. If that is the case for an extended period of hours and days, it would indicate the cleaning service does not function or that the house manager is not doing their job. Or, operators can use IoT such as infrared cameras to track where people spend most of their time and which utilities are being used most.

Here are a few more examples of how IoT could be implemented in coliving spaces:

• Place infrared cameras that don’t recognise faces, but do analyse how people use the space, in order for the operator to understand the most-used spots to improve further development facilities.
• Have a sensor at the living room door that sends
  a message to the community group whenever someone enters, such as, “Someone is in the living room, come join!”.
• Have the bed connected to the tenant’s alarm clock, and wake up the tenant when his sleep cycle ends.

In addition, IoT can also be implemented in ways that are more controversial:

• Following the example of Alexa (Amazon speakers), coliving operators could listen to customer conversations and analyse the datathrough a conversational artificial intelligence,
  to better understand the core needs, topics and interests of their members. This would, in turn,
  help operators make better decisions in terms of marketing strategies or what type of events to host. Note: the data analysis can remain totally anonymous.
• Following the example of an internet company that provides free WiFi in exchange for collecting personal data, in order to provide hyper- personalised ads, operators could collect data from residents in exchange for free or lower rent, to showcase more relevant advertisements.
• Cameras can be put at the entrance of bathrooms, and a toilet sensor would then create a correlation between residents who enter the bathroom and leave it dirty.

These examples represent the uses of IoT in radical ways. Much like real estate and other industries generally, coliving will increasingly be moderated by technology regulations and data. Hence the question arises: what data can be taken from coliving spaces, and to what degree is it morally (and legally) correct?

‍
My prediction is that around the year 2025, the real estate industry will see the entrance of the big tech players, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, who will open their first own housing products, aiming to tackle the need for affordable housing - a promise they made five years prior. This will lead to a more elaborate debate around the privatisation of housing and cities, coupled with a debate around privacy and IoT. Other companies, including car companies like Toyota and BMW, will open their own spaces as well, led by a wider ambition to test their own technologies.

It is therefore up to us, the actors of the coliving ecosystem, to define how we want to use technology. One thing is for sure: those who will stand out will be the ones who use technology to create the best human experience possible.

I am personally excited to see what innovation will happen in the space and can’t wait to contribute my part to it.