Facilitatingcommunication
Oct 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Steven J. Orfield
Treating the conference room as a blend of technology and environment will inevitably enhance the quality of the presentations it houses.
The conference center is, most importantly, not an exercise in technology but an exercise in human occupancy, often used under the pressure or boredom of a meeting. The tasks in a conference center are those of relaxing the attendee, stimulating him and assisting with the process of communications in the most user-friendly ways. This does not describe most conference centers today, but it clearly does describe some of the better ones.
Before the advent of current conference technology and current conference practices, meetings were often held in smaller, more personal venues with a less formal air. The meeting might be in a boardroom, but there was daylighting and lighting in most of these rooms before light in any form became offensive to the A-V community. Now, meetings tend to occur in darkened rooms, and the human side of the equation is subverted by the technical side. What used to be pleasant is now problematic, and what used to be discussion and counterpoint is now a room full of occupants in a passive mode facing a PowerPoint presentation. A step up or a step down? It is hardly arguable.
The conference facility, at its best, will support a meeting in as transparent a method as possible. Whether the meeting is media- or presenter-intensive, the most important things to consider are the message and its transmission, the interplay of attendee to presenter, and the potential for this communication to emerge as the memorable event. The architecture and technology, as in the concert hall, provide only an envelope for that communication. As the best of architects know well, the best of buildings provide a stimulating experience, not of the building, but of experiencing the environment and one's activity as a single experience. Rather than acting as a static design, good and bad architectural spaces produce different associations, response and behavior.
Designing high-quality visual environments for presentation is highly complex, and it requires skills in visual perception, lighting and daylighting, and A-V engineering and presentation development. It also requires the knowledge of occupant comfort and preference in this type of process environment. Finally, it requires the ability to model the environment visually in 3-D. Although the technology of the conference center is able to be upgraded, the room itself is the limit of the problem and must be carefully developed to operate well over the long term.
What is it that provides the opportunity for that type of experience, and how can the design team provide that envelope of experience? There are a number of issues that underpin good visual conference environments, and their understanding can be useful to all team members. Such issues are controlled daylighting, transparent visual technology, reasonable viewing and lighting conditions, visually balanced color choices and well-designed media.
Controlled daylighting
Architectural research has shown repeatedly that the most positive or negative aspect of most occupied environments is the presence or absence of daylighting. This is clearly evident in well-designed residential and commercial architecture, with their emphasis on intensive daylighting use. There are, however, certain venues that tend to reject daylighting because of the need for use of video signals or controlled lighting. One of these venues is the conference center. Even the largest of architects have a problem with this issue, and the A-V community, not generally understanding either the importance of daylighting or the methods of using and controlling it, tends to reinforce this avoidance in many presentation venues.
Daylighting can be used effectively in conference facilities if certain things are understood clearly. Daylighting can always be designed to work in these venues, but its use must be controlled so that direct sunlight does not enter the facility and neither direct nor indirect daylighting causes veiling reflections on presentation screens. Also, colors in the conference facility must be light and matte in finish so that daylighting does not appear too bright in contrast to these interior finishes. Heat from daylighting elements must be controlled, generally via the use of low-E type glazing of high visual transmittance. Additionally, interior lighting must be available not only for dark periods of the day, but also to increase interior illumination to control contrast between the interior and daylighting. Often, the most effective method of daylighting is indirect - a clerestory or skylights - which are out of the occupant's direct view. Most daylighting elements can have adju! stable control or shut out from daylighting for those times when the presenter wants this isolation, but these closures are rarely used in well-designed facilities.
Transparent visual technology
There is often a battle waged between the architect and the technical consultants with regard to technology used in conference centers. Some design firms want to feature the technology and make the conference center visually high tech. Other firms are more interested in designing the room as though the technology is not its prime definition, and we find our sympathies with the second group for a number of reasons. Presenters are seldom high-tech in their understanding or comfort with technology; technology is often a distraction to their presentation and a barrier to its smooth execution. Also, attendees at conferences generally find themselves more relaxed if the conference space provides a comfortable, low-key environment. Self-consciously technical facilities seem imposing to many participants.
If the conference center is to be visually transparent, a number of things must be resolved. Presentation screens must be rear projected, so that neither the appearance nor the sound of the projector impinges on the meeting space. Forward projected images have problems in being blocked by presenters, affecting the ceiling height and design and being a dominant visual aspect of the room. Video cameras should be concealed to the degree possible by building them into the architecture. Mic technology should be concealed in tables and podiums or selected for minimum visual profile. Control systems should be visually apparent only to the presenter and should be visually simple and readable under low or no light The control units should also use standardized control metaphors that the presenter does not have to learn; a look at a human factors handbook would be in order. Lastly, control rooms should be unobtrusive and carefully lit so that attendees cannot view activity within them d! uring a presentation.
Reasonable viewing and lighting conditions
There are normally two different viewers - the presenter and the attendees. Each type has a set of unique visual problems that must be addressed in order to provide a positive visual environment for a conference center. Both parties should be visually relaxed, and the environment should allow both to stabilize visually within a reasonable adaptation range (average luminance level). In contrast to common knowledge in lighting, illuminance in the room must provide minimum amounts of light for reading, but the level (foot-candles or lux) is essentially unimportant. Luminance values (values of room surfaces and fixtures seen by the occupant) are generally not considered but arefar more important. These values, expressed in foot-lamberts, nits, candelas/m2), describe the viewers environment and its balance, contrast, and brightness.
Generally, the only luminance information sometimes available in conference facilities is the values of screen luminance provided by projectors, and this is useful in determining ratios of viewing brightness in various types of rooms. On the other hand, most rooms have only one lighting standard, and that is the illuminance or foot-candle level. The use of this sole lighting standard is based on a lack of understanding of lighting design. Two rooms can have the same foot-candle values (light levels on the working plane), but their luminance values can be in a ratio of 10:1 simply because of the reflection of the light from surfaces in the room. If there is little or no surface illumination provided, these surfaces will be dark. If the selections of finishes are low in reflectance (dark), the room will be darker yet. If finishes are specular (glossy), the room will be even darker. Thus, 100 foot-candles of horizontal illuminance can translate into a range of visual luminance of! anywhere from 80 foot-lamberts to less than 1 foot-lambert. Luminance must be controlled in a range sufficient for visual comfort, and the older the audience, the narrower the range (much like acoustics). It is the visual environment and not the lighting level that drives the quality of the experience.
Visually balanced color choices
The design of conference spaces suggests some limits on color choices, especially when daylighting is emphasized. In a room that is darkened for all presentations, color is not much of an issue because all colors shift to a nominal gray-black in darkness. In more sophisticated environments, color has far more impact in both its reflectance and in its saturation. Viewing of media is influenced by the color adaptation of the eye, and if a space is not chromatically neutral, the visual response shifts because of the chromatic stimulus. Thus, a room with red carpet would be a significant visual stimulus if the room were not darkened, and a light reflectance, neutral room would provide less competition for the media presented. (See the photo of the Monona Terrace Lecture hall, a hall that is darkened for presentation and has no daylighting)
Well-designed media
Often, the most significant problem in the conference center (and in presentation media in general) is the visual media being presented. The projector may be one of the more powerful systems, and the screen may be properly selected and designed; the lighting and daylighting may be elegant and well-controlled, but the presentation itself may be a mess. It may be low in legibility, small in character size, oversaturated in color, complex in color choices, visually complex and organized with no concept of presentation methods or normal reading processes. Many of the complaints logged regarding the failure of conference facilities to perform are really based on the failure of the presentation itself. We have all seen presentations that are put together by persons with no regard for the quality or utility of the visual experience. Unfortunately, as Marshall McLuhan said years ago, "The media is the message," and he was, of course, right. A number of years ago, Orfield Labs started ! to look at this in research spon sored by Sony, Barco, Sharp, Draper, DaLite and Optix. In developing the concept of "visual intelligibility," Orfield Labs attempted to demonstrate that the ability to communicate was a far more important descriptor of visual quality than image brightness or resolution, which is similar to intelligibility in considering sound systems. This is a most important area of research in the presentation field, and we believe that it will eventually be built into presentation technology and software.
When designing for the presentation facility, it is important to consider the aforementioned factors - controlled daylighting, transparent visual technology, reasonable viewing and lighting conditions, visually balanced color choices, and well-designed media. Some factors, especially with respect to equipment specification, will lie under your direct control. To address other considerations, such as the room's painting scheme, you may find yourself working with architects or facility managers. Be prepared to explain how their choices will influence your ability to meet your ultimate, mutual objective - providing an effective meeting and presentation environment. Finally, there will be factors that lie outside your direct or indirect control, as is the case with the media chosen for presentation. Taking a moment to explain to your client how his choices in presentation media will influence a presentation's effectiveness, however, can go a long way toward avoiding his calling yo! u back to rectify a problem that lies beyond the scope of your responsibility.
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