The Most Out-of-Date Credential in Your Building

I have built ePaper products for close to twenty years, so read my view with that in mind. For most of that time, the screen industry has measured progress by how big and how bright a display can be. For a building, the more practical question is how many surfaces it needs to show accurate information, and how few of them need a cable.

Lately I have been asking that question about the smallest screen we make: the badge on someone's lanyard, and who keeps it accurate once it has been handed out. Few organisations can answer that.

The badge nobody owns

Ask an IT manager about laptops and you will get a patch report. Ask about access cards and you will usually get a shrug, or the name of someone in facilities who keeps a spreadsheet. The card was printed at onboarding. After that it belongs to nobody in particular, so it stays as printed through promotions, desk moves and, too often, a resignation.

I think of this as the reprint gap: the time between a change in someone's record and the moment their badge reflects it. In many offices that gap runs to months.

Passwords show how this plays out. In a 2023 PasswordManager.com survey of 1,000 US workers, 47% said they were still using a former employer's password. Physical credentials tend to get even less attention.

How we ended up making badges

Our first product, more than a decade ago, was a wireless ePaper display for meeting room doors. Room booking at the time meant expensive, wired installations, and we wanted something you could put on a wall and leave alone for months. Over the years, customers pulled us into desk booking, visitor management and employee communications, and most of our engineering effort moved into software.

Somewhere along the way I started seeing every device we make as the place where a change in software shows up in front of a person. A badge is the same idea, worn on a lanyard.

What changes when the badge has a screen

A badge with an ePaper display, Bluetooth and NFC can be managed like any other endpoint. How much that matters depends on how long someone wears it.

An employee badge stays with a person for years, so it should follow their identity record. A new title or photo arrives over Bluetooth. A lost badge is revoked centrally, and in buildings whose access control supports it, the NFC chip works as the door credential too.

Event badges are a different problem. Nobody thinks about a badge after the conference closes, but everyone notices a misspelled name at registration. Writing badges straight from the attendee list fixes most of that, and a correction takes a re-sync. From what we have seen, it works best for events of roughly 150 to 500 people, where collecting badges at the exit is realistic.

A visitor badge is worn for an hour or two. The gain there is mostly at reception: the badge clears itself when it goes back in the dock, and the label printer can go.

We built the Joan ePaper Badge to handle all three. It is the smallest screen we make and, in a sense, the one with the biggest job, because it is the only one that knows who it belongs to.

Today our badge covers identity and door access. I can see it going further, for example paying for coffee from the office machine, releasing a print job, opening a locker or checking someone in at a booked desk. None of that is available yet, and each would depend on systems the building already runs. Once a badge is a managed device, though, those become integration projects more than hardware ones.

What we built the badge to pass

Low-cost ePaper badges are already on the market. When we designed ours, we started from the tests I would expect any IT team to run on a device that doubles as an access credential, and we built the badge to pass them:

• Revocation from one place. If a badge is lost or someone leaves, an administrator revokes it in the Joan Portal, so nobody has to chase down a physical card. The badge's screen updates the next time it is within Bluetooth range.
• A fleet set up from a phone. One administrator can configure a whole set of badges at once through the Joan Mobile App, with no card printer and no reprint order.
• Battery life measured in months. The badge runs for about 200 days on a charge, so it stays on the lanyard and out of the desk drawer.
• One platform for every screen. The badges are managed in the same Joan Workplace platform that already runs room displays, desk booking, visitor management and digital signage, so there is no extra console with its own login.

Security has been one of our core design principles since the first meeting room display. Anyone evaluating badges should ask every vendor to demonstrate these four points on their own network before signing anything.

A badge only works if people wear it

Every check above assumes the badge is actually on someone's lanyard. In practice, people leave awkward badges in a drawer and ask reception for a temporary pass instead, which opens the reprint gap again from the other side. That is why we treated the badge's design as part of its security from the start: a credential people are happy to wear is one IT can actually manage.

When I judge workplace technology, I look at what it took away. For badges, that list starts with the reprint queue and ends with the card that kept opening a door long after its owner had left. The intelligence behind it stays invisible. The display is where it becomes real.