Introduction

Implenia, a leading construction service company, sits comfortably among the 100 largest businesses in Switzerland. The company's fingerprint and achievements are vast and impressive, from building large parts of the Swiss railway infrastructure to digging tunnels through the Swiss Alps, such as the Gotthard.

Even more impressive is that Implenia keeps challenging the status quo in other sectors it is less well-known for, namely, timber construction.

Benefits of modular timber hotel rooms

Building with timber has a measurable environmental benefit and better unit economics. In an attempt to scale this positive impact, Implenia launched a modular prototype of a timber hotel room. The modular construction approach for hotel rooms with timber enables more predictable costs, faster openings, less waste, and higher flexibility. Leveraging IoT capabilities to make hotel operations and the guest experience more efficient and pleasant adds to this concept's ecological and economic benefits. headbits was brought in to prototype the digital guest experience for this project.

How might we design a convenient guest experience while making the environmental-friendly aspects of the stay tangible?

Time was of the essence as the coordination with various construction parties, a fast-approaching deadline, and still, many unknowns required a flexible but robust straw man. We conceptualized a "HotelOS" considering available data from IoT devices and sustainability research, the personas ranging from the guest to cleaning staff and hotel investors, and several hotel management approaches and applications.

Together with Implenia, we decided to showcase only four use cases through an app and TV mockup, ensuring that guests get all relevant information at the glance of an eye.

Timber: Indicate how fast the amount of wood used for this particular room re-grows in the hotel's home market.

Electricity: Inform the guest about the source, availability, and usage of green electricity.

Occupancy: Provide live occupancy updates in amenities such as the restaurant, gym, or spa alongside a forecast.

Cleaning: Demo an enhanced room cleaning system helping staff to be more efficient while avoiding unexpected and awkward stare-downs with guests.

After successfully showcasing the hotel room to selected visitors, we still have many ideas to move Implenia's "Green Hospitality" project with a fully-fledged "HotelOS" into production.