Home > Articles By Issue > Space Planning & Interiors >Article July 2003

Trading Conference Spaces (Special Report)

By Dana Dubbs

As is often the case in life what appears at first examination as two separate, unrelated workplace factors can meld to serve two distinct business needs. This type of opportunity is now available to facility managers with regard to their footprint planning. Because companies are downsizing their office square footage, facility professionals are being asked to find solutions utilizing smaller workspaces-yet still have room for office furnishings, and personnel to complete their daily tasks and duties.

In another development, companies have made considerable investments into expensive technologies for conference and training spaces. Upper management, less tolerant of seeing equipment sit idle, want its pricey investments justified.

Surprisingly, these seemingly incongruous developments of available high tech space and much needed footprint planning can come together to serve both facility professionals' and upper managements' needs. Traditionally, conference/training spaces have been used for concise, specific reasons, and are now being viewed as areas that can be generically outfitted and easily reconfigured to support numerous functions.

Flexible Solutions

Being able to use these spaces for new applications means having furnishings that can readily adapt to different needs. Jeff Pinney, vice president of sales at Versteel in Jasper, IN, reports significantly higher demand over the past 18 months for the furniture manufacturer's castered tables-Tim meeting tables. Employees can easily reconfigure or fold up the tables and then roll them away.

When Washington DC-based architecture firm RTKL Associates Inc. was designing new offices for Drake Beam Morin (DBM) in Rochester, NY one of the architect's tasks was to make the outplacement firm's training room more useable. The room in the previous location was furnished with fixed rows of tables and computers. It was uninviting for any other use and sat idle at least 50% of the time.

RTKL's solution? Replace the tables with tablet arm chairs that are easy to move. The change enabled room requirements to shrink from 600 square feet to 400 square feet while maintaining the same number of seats, making the space both flexible and useful. "By bringing in tablet arm chairs and doing wireless technology with laptops, the room can be set up as a training room or reconfigured for different types of discussions," says Dennis Gaffney, vice president, RTKL.

Of course chairs are not the only piece of furniture that have undergone a transformation in this area.

"The traditional conference table is gone," exclaims Dan Tuohy, district sales manager, Boise Office Solutions, Itasca, IL. "Tables have got to be easily folded and on wheels-or removable altogether-so people can go into the space and use it as a work room, war room, team room, or for whatever they need to do."

And if the company conference table needs a retrofit, manufacturers like The Wiremold Company of West Hartford, CT, can make them tech-ready. Wiremold's deQuorum Worksurface Portal, for example, can be installed into existing conference tables, mobile teaming tables, and other work surfaces to give employees table top access to power, voice, and data.

Tech Savvy Arrangements

At the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), U.S. General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service (PBS) in Washington, DC, a dazzling array of audio/visual, videoconferencing, and teleconferencing equipment keeps a new multimedia conference center in constant use. Intended as a showcase for technology and a way to help cut travel costs, the room enables electronic meetings, presentations, training, planning, and brainstorming sessions between people at other sites.

The room's main feature is a custom table. Its features include 14 computer monitors embedded in the surface, pull out keyboards, six built-in microphones arrayed down the center of the table, and power and communications hook-ups at either end for ad hoc laptops.

The room is also outfitted with presentation podium, LCD projector, document camera, smart board, plasma screens, VCRs, DVD player, cable TV tuners, ceiling and wall speakers, and a facilitator's workstation from which all equipment can be controlled. The room has capability to link with three additional sites or can link with all 11 GSA regional sites using a third party bridging service.

Another example of a highly sophisticated workspace is the Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield's collaboration center in Manhattan. The center is not the kind of training room where employees sit and watch a program. In fact, the room is for operators and trainers who sit in cubicles from which they can link electronically to individuals or groups in conference rooms at up to six other sites.

Each cubicle is furnished with a monitor, headset microphone, and a highly sophisticated console that allows the operator to see and hear everything that goes on at the other sites. Users can also speak with participants, and control every aspect of any videoconference, Webcast, or interactive online training session.

Comfortable Settings

With conference centers getting bigger, personnel have greater space to make phone calls or take breaks between sessions.

"This is being done completely for reasons of comfort," states Gaffney. "Employees are spending a lot of time in conferences these days, and employers want them to be at their top performance level."

The Office of the CIO's multimedia center uses highly adjustable, ergonomic leather chairs that have extra-wide seats to accommodate people of all sizes. In doing so, companies are acknowledging that not everyone can fit into the type of seats the airlines sell to flyers.

Room Strategies

While creature comforts are important, pragmatic conference/training room strategies are needed for these spaces to work effectively. For example, light and how it reflects in a room should be a weighted consideration.

Light levels in a room designed for videoconferencing should be between 55' and 70' candles at face height-about 4' above the floor. This is to ensure peoples' faces are picked up clearly by the camera so a good image can be transmitted to people on the other end.

Because reflection can be problematic, especially for videoconferencing, possible steps to control illumination should be taken that enables participants to see the monitors clearly. An anti-reflective glass top may be helpful in multimedia rooms.

Val Loh, a senior associate of technology at New York, NY Syska Hennessy, advises against using metallic and reflective finishes in videoconferencing rooms. This avoids having distracting reflections that could be picked up by cameras.

Tuned In

Acoustics may only be noticed when not working effectively.

"People within that space need to be able to understand each other," says Susan Rhoades, marketing manager at Armstrong, the Lancaster, PA-based ceiling manufacturer. "You want to control the room acoustically in terms of material selection, absorption capability of the ceiling tile, absorptive capability in terms of wall acoustical treatment, or the construction of the wall system and ceilings."

Armstrong's i-ceilings products are not the ceiling tiles they appear to be. They can have the same surface as other Armstrong acoustical ceiling tiles, but they are not acoustical tiles at all. In fact, they are technology enablers. The product can deliver a page, provide sound for a projector system, or enable speech to accompany teleconferencing equipment.

With the Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield's classrooms, acoustics were a key consideration. "The classrooms are acoustically prepared to achieve as quiet an environment as possible," says Alan Bjornsen, a principal of the New York, NY-based Cerami & Associates. His company is an acoustical consulting, audio/visual design, and information technology firm that worked on the Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield classroom as well as the collaboration center.

Today's conference/training spaces allow personnel to work in adaptable places for various tasks, and eliminate upper managements' and facility managements' concerns at the same time.