By: Carol Emmens

Open space floor plans are now the norm in corporations. According to the International Management Facility Association, approximately 70% of all employees in the U.S. work in open offices, which were popularized by hi-tech companies such as Google. Open spaces are viewed as a way for the employees to interact and to innovate.

In practice, open spaces often buzz like a beehive and make it difficult to concentrate or to collaborate with a team. Consequently, architects and facility managers are designing and constructing small rooms for team work. The rooms are often called huddle rooms and they are in use in almost every industry ranging from finance to technology to healthcare and they are also use in universities and colleges. They create an atmosphere for collaboration and for brainstorming, which help teams deliver (in theory) better performance in sales, marketing, research and productivity.

Typically huddle rooms are small to encourage everyone, even those who are normally less vocal, to participate in collaboration. Technology is the key to making a huddle room popular with employees; a highly used huddle room has the audiovisual equipment and IT access which makes collaboration easy by allowing information within the room and outside the room to be shared and displayed. Both audiovisual companies and IT companies were quick to develop equipment for use in huddle rooms

The majority of huddle rooms are equipped with only the basics: A 42” or 50” flat panel screen with an overlay to encourage annotation or a short-throw projector and a whiteboard. But that is only the first step. For employees using a wide variety of devices, a huddle rooms requires a wide range of connectors (HDMI, DVI, and VGA). Employees use iPhones, laptops, and tablets daily at home so they bring them into the work place. They expect to use their own devices as well as company computers; BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is commonplace.

The employees’ device cameras are used to connect to colleagues and industry leaders located elsewhere for impromptu FaceTime or Skype. For most rooms, however, higher quality wall mounted speakers and cameras are needed to create an atmosphere of eye to eye contact and collaboration.

To minimize the plugging and unplugging of devices from the display, high speed switchers allow the participants to hook up all at once and to switch easily from laptops, tablets or Smartphones. A high resolution switcher/scaler allows multiple images to be displayed on one screen or multiple screens.

Content sharing including information online is the number one objective and huddle rooms often have Wi-Fi. It is often necessary to connect to information on the network or in a cloud based storage system such as Drop Box. Wi-Fi is sometimes slow or unstable; a router or a bridge in the huddle room provide the teams with faster and more reliable way to access information and to provide more security, which is a priority to protect confidential information. A top notch huddle room requires the audiovisual team and the IT department to work together and to understand what each is doing to avoid blocking a network set up for the room.

Frequently corporations require multiple huddle rooms which are earmarked for specific activities such as videoconferencing (check our February blog for more information) or project meetings. On occasion a room is used for one team of experts drawn from cross cultural fields to work together on one project from start to finish. These have been dubbed “scrum” rooms and they serve as the primary work space for the members of the team.

There is no typical huddle room, and no typical budget. The budget needs to be based on the number of rooms desired and the objectives of each. A modest budget of $3-4,000 is the norm for the vast majority of the rooms and it is usually sufficient as the costs for technology continue to drop.
Whatever the cost, users agree that huddle rooms are necessary and that benefits are enormous in terms of generating innovation, critical thinking and problem solving. Forget the water cooler – the huddle room is where the action is.
To learn more information click here to download the ‘Tech Managers Guide to Huddle Rooms’ from AV Technology by New Bay Media.

We at Zeo Systems pride ourselves on being at the forefront of changes in the AV world. At the start of the 2014-2015 academic year, new educational standards known as Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were launched nationwide. Because of the wide discrepancies in educational standards from state to state, educators across the country established Common Core as a national set of standards and testing for math, science, and English for grades K-12. Pennsylvania is one of 44 states to voluntarily adopt the standards.

Common Core’s main objectives for students set the bar high:

1. To Be Prepared for College or Work
2. To Succeed in a Global Economy
3. To Develop Critical Thinking
4. To Solve Problems

To achieve those goals, schools everywhere are instituting new methods of teaching or “blended learning”, which involves using technology including the Internet effectively. Technology, at its best, enables students to use information to compare, contrast, and analyze data to help develop lifelong skills.

As early as 4^th grade, schools are expected to supplement their face-to-face instruction with online delivery of information which will be incorporated into student projects whether they are research papers, audio and/or video presentations or demonstrations.

Besides robust IT networks, classrooms, conference rooms, and libraries need the audiovisual technology equipment to support the new teaching techniques. Common Core encourages students to not only do research but to share digital and print information through presentations displayed on a large screen. Both students and teachers are encouraged to display information from online courses, to participate in video conferences with students across the country or across the world, or to demonstrate student projects – preferably all interactively.

As the curriculum changes, projectors or flat screens are becoming more and more necessary; they allow content sharing and collaboration by teachers and students both within in the classroom and the classroom and outside the classroom with students or experts in libraries, museums, and colleges. IT/AV systems are growing in sophistication every day, frequently including multiple displays, audio and recording systems. In addition, control systems are often necessary to ensure the technologies work together seamlessly and to make them easier to use.

Increasingly, students will collaborate or brainstorm in small groups in “huddle” rooms equipped with multiple data inputs and a large flat screen. Students often bring their own tablets or laptops into schools and that trend will only continue to grow. Schools will need to be prepared for the onslaught of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) by purchasing a wide assortment of connectors as there is no “standard” connection. The need to connect multiple devices to save time and inconvenience when changing sources will increase. Like corporations and universities, schools will need to automate the schedules of huddle rooms through a combination of software and digital signage (displays) outside the rooms.

Hands-on learning, building and modeling are encouraged by Common Core and will require capture or recording devices ranging from cell phones and tablets to video cameras. Small TV studios will be necessary for more than would-be film producers or directors. Students will not only utilize technology to write research papers and book reports but to present this information through well researched, written and edited audio and/or video presentations.

Common Core essentially requires schools to have all types of rooms and technology. Zeo Systems designs and installs AV systems to fit each environment whether it is a classroom, auditorium, huddle room or studio. The physical space, however, is only one challenge. There are difficult challenges ahead for teachers, parents and community leaders alike. The transition to Common Core will require teachers to alter their styles of instruction to incorporate diverse types of media, websites, and online courses into their lesson plans. This will require a commitment by the schools and school districts themselves to fund the expansion of AV technology in the schools. Through this commitment, and the assistance of the AV experts like those at Zeo Systems, the goals of Common Core can be achieved.