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Conference Room Design Helps Meetings Go Paperless
Don Kreski, AV Technology, 14th May, 2009
About two years ago, the decision was made to take these meetings paperless,” explains Jill Nowak, the American Association of Orthodontists’ (AAO) director of finance and administration. There were many advantages to the decision, but a big potential downside as well. “Going paperless led to a need for people to be on their notebook computers constantly, and to have fast access to the web portal where all the documents and their notes reside,” she explains. “But we also had a need for them to move their focus away from their computers, to interact with their colleagues and have meaningful discussions.”
To meet these two contradictory needs, the board decided to try to redesign their boardroom in a way that would encourage personal interaction while members used and shared computer files.
PAPERLESS MEETINGS
The AAO is made up of professional orthodontists throughout the United States and Canada. It is governed by volunteers who meet, most often, at the association’s headquarters in St. Louis. These meetings, as well as gatherings of the charitable AAO Foundation and day-to-day staff meetings, keep the boardroom in almost constant use.
Many of these meetings are intense. There’s a premium on keeping information flowing quickly and making good decisions. “Until about 18 months ago we supplied all of the information needed for the board’s discussions by paper and mail,” says Nowak. “We would ship huge binders to each member a few weeks before a meeting. The information was always dynamic, so the first part of every meeting would be devoted to passing out
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updated pages that they would put into their big books.”
The association now posts all of the information on a web server running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to give members the ability to read, annotate, upload, and modify meeting materials.
“The big hurdle on going paperless,” Nowak explains, “is, as people review recommendations, they want to make notes and highlight certain things, sometimes publicly and sometimes only for their own reference.”
Now board, council, and committee members can walk into a meeting carrying only their laptops, yet access reports and presentations that they may have uploaded or annotated on other computers prior to the meeting. The board and support staff used SharePoint for about six months before they began to look at the boardroom itself and how it could best be structured to facilitate the new meeting style.
DESIGNING THE AV SYSTEM
“As an organization, we have been very progressive in our use of technology,” says Nowak. “But this has been our first project where technology drove the facility design.” Nowak and Information Systems manager Eric Mutrux brought in Dennis Kinion of St. Louis, MO-based Conference Technologies, Inc. to turn their ideas into a working design.
Kinion and CTI engineer Eric Snider designed a system that would be built into an octagonal table and a center insert with eight LG Electronics 37-inch LCD displays facing outward toward 20 meeting participants. Board and committee members can face each other and speak naturally, while keeping the central displays within a comfortable line of sight. With this setup, it’s easy and natural for meeting participants to glance from their laptops to presentation slides or videos and to each other, encouraging technology use and person-to-person contact simultaneously.
The display screen placement was the biggest challenge, says Mutrux. “We really looked at every possibility. We considered putting the screens up in air, putting them in the table, and giving the members individual screens, until finally the people at CTI came up with an idea that we all thought was the best.”
“The tolerances to which we had that table made were pretty tight,” says Kinion. “Board and committee members would sit at that table hour after hour. They didn’t want to have to sit up or lean over to look at the LCD screens. We had to design furniture that would allow them to sit comfortably, even with their laptops in front of them, and see clearly.” Kinion says he worked with the builder, Korte Construction of Highland, IL, to modify the main table design, but contracted separately with A&G Woodworking of St. Louis to build the matching center cabinet.
The board and staff had a number of concerns beyond the placement of the screens. “Acoustics can be a problem,” says Mutrux, “and sometimes in the old boardroom people would have to strain to hear all of the discussions.” A voice reinforcement system became a priority. “We also wanted AC outlets for the laptops, an interface to the LCD screens, and a fast, wired internet connection,” adds Mutrux.Kinion added an Altinex TNP121 popup in front of each seat with these connections. Since the room would also be used, at times, for large staff meetings, Kinion mounted two 50-inch LG plasma displays on the walls, visible to people sitting back from the central table.
Finally, there was a concern that the equipment they installed be compatible with the standards current for at least the next three-tofive years. So the decision was made to install high definition displays, switching, videoconferencing, and even a high-def recording system to be used by staff members to aid in correcting each meeting’s minutes.
THE HIGH DEFINITION CHALLENGE
There were several challenges to engineering the room that the group envisioned. The sightlines were difficult and the drawings had to be precise. Another problem was limited space for cable runs. “We cut a 6-inch trough into the concrete floor,” explains Snider. “But that was not going to be enough to accommodate 20 VGA cables coming out of the laptops.”
Instead, Snider included a Magenta Research Cat-5 transmitter in the millwork below each popup. It converts the VGA and audio signals from the laptop into a digital format so they can be carried by far less bulky Cat-5 cable. In the same way, three 8-channel Biamp AudiaEXPI boxes reduce the audio from 20 gooseneck microphones to three Cat- 5 cables. A Magenta Mondo matrix switcher handles the switching of the digital video and audio signals. “The final redistribution of the room had to be digital,” adds Snider. “Flat panel monitors will not display 1080p unless it’s a digital signal.”
The high-def conferencing was a little more straightforward. Snider designed a system around a Polycom HDX-9000 codec, fed by four pan/tilt/zoom cameras that rise from the top of the central hub only as needed. Each camera captures up to five board members, and CTI programmed enough presets to zoom in on any individual making a presentation.
For the sound reinforcement system, CTI installed Tannoy CVS 6 ceiling loudspeakers powered by a Crestron 3-channel amplifier. For presence, they included TOA H1 speakers under each of the central monitors.
Another challenge was finding a high definition recording system that could record input from the cameras, microphones, and Polycom system. “We found a Gefen personal DVR that worked out very nicely,” Snyder explains. “I can record any stream in the room at 720p resolution. It has RS-232 control, but it was very inexpensive.”
Nowak says it took a great deal of effort to plan and build this room. “Our board is very interested in consensus building,” she says. It was absolutely crucial for all concerned to build a room that functioned smoothly and facilitated the work done there, which she feels was accomplished.
Don Kreski, president of Kreski Marketing Consultants, has been writing about the AV industry for almost 30 years. He can be reached at www.kreski.com/contact.
