Do you ever feel you’ve been asked to make the wrong room into a Microsoft Teams Room?
Maybe you’re so used to it happening you no longer wonder why?
One of my most (self-)loved dad jokes concerns the person who is driving totally lost down a country lane and stops to ask a local the way back to the city. The local replies: ‘Well if I were you I wouldn’t start from here’!
This is an accurate parable for technology-enhanced meeting and teaching spaces. Let me put it another way.
If you asked an owner this: Shall I make you a building where the rooms are the wrong size and shape; then let’s spend money undoing the room finishes in order to install the technology and to make them useable/rentable; OK, then let’s fix the lighting so they will kill the displays, create asthenopia (eye strain) and will cost you thousands per year in unneeded electricity? While we’re at it, shall we make some spaces that we light and heat, are nice-to-have but not need-to-have but will only get used once in a blue moon? The list goes on.
The challenge about fitting out technology into spaces, is that the spaces are often not suitable to start with. This is a legitimate project premise for refurbs, but for new builds? The waste in upfront and running costs can be spectacular.
Isn’t it funny how the AV profession so often speaks of the architect as the enemy?
The answer is actually very simple, yet rarely witnessed sufficiently. The architect cannot be seen as the enemy, but as someone to engage with to create a win-win strategy for owners and stakeholders.
Like in Jerry Maguire: Show me the money! In the end the argument for the intelligent use of environmental and AV standards as a basic premise of building projects is financial. You spend less money if buildings are right first time. They cost less to run. They have higher occupancy rates and achieve higher rents per floor area,
In my consulting work, creating strategies for dealing with these issues - very often an outturn of organisational silos whose existence is a heritage issue of being created before buildings needed to be technology enhanced - is often as important as helping to optimise space configuration.
Posted: 17th March 2023