Audio and video designers and integrators have new tools to make their designs more productive and cost-effective.
Juan F Montoya*
Audio is an art!... and those of us who work on this are in love with it, always looking for the subtle details, the naturalness of the sound, its depth, its dynamics, the emotions it generates and the feelings it awakens.
Some curiosity has led us to delve deeper into this world, and we have entered to study its already more technical aspects, locking ourselves to read and scrutinize as much technical article as we find and that is where organizations like AES give us the opportunity to know more about physical, material, equations, algorithms and other "scientific" aspects.
But with a very high possibility, if you are a reader of this magazine, and you have come to this article, it is because you are also living from sound, or at least sound is being a source of income for you, either because you do it as a freelancer, or because you have created a small company together with some colleagues, or why not..., you probably work in a large corporation. And this is where the romantic aspect of art and the small dose of nerd of the scientific world must be complemented with commercial terms such as efficiency, performance, productivity, etc., etc.
But how do we combine all of the above in a changing world, where time is pressing and where there are so many interests to please?
How do we achieve productivity without sacrificing quality? To deliver the best projects and designs economically favorable for the client and in turn for the company?
It has always been a problem to try to balance these different technical, artistic and commercial aspects, in a way that allows us to generate business that resembles an industrial production line, but even so, without losing the magic we dream of.
Possibly there is a formula to allow us to get closer to this and then we will explain it.
If because of the size of your company you have to do everything, from the design, the sale, the installation to the collection of the project. Your time is vital to the growth of the business. Being able to have a tool that speeds up your design is essential, and although at certain times you have your head thinking about a thousand administrative things, you will have to use a method to remind you of the artistic and scientific part of the products you need to place in your design without then having to assume costs for forgetfulness, or in other cases, stop offering solutions and products that could improve your offer for greater customer satisfaction and in turn, higher revenue for you.
Or if you are already in the situation where there are people working for you and the turnover of sales and engineering staff is more constant than you would like. And when these people leave your company they leave you with a gap, which forces you to start over with another technical or commercial staff that will not be really productive and reliable until several months later. What can be done?
A good practice is to rely on a tool that promotes your productivity under the following aspects:
- Have everything at hand without needing to be looking for many different places.
- Be updated that it is available and that things you can no longer count on easily.
- Remember at the right time the products and accessories that could be used for this specific case- Not before or after.
- Having someone to give you ideas of various alternatives and combinations, but all within the context that you need them so that it is not a useless mental load.
Entering the practical world, which is what I imagine you are expecting from this article, audiovisual projects are becoming more complex every day, and the integration needs of multiple solutions, technologies and products that guarantee the best performance have become almost the norm, and having an "electronic tutor" who is showing you the best options is key in productivity to get more projects in less time, but without lowering quality, or having to fall into the copy-paste of always repeating the same solution thinking more about the mechanical part of the business than about the same customer satisfaction.
Regardless of the size and complexity of the audiovisual project you are facing, you should look for tools that help you select the most appropriate products easily and agilely, either because you have to do everything on your own, because of the size of your company, or because you have to guarantee that the "new" person who arrives can design projects more agilely even if they do not have the previous experience we would like to have.
Stages of the solution
For now let me explain short the concept of methodologies to improve designs, and elements that you can already put into practice through tools that are available (some) for free on the Internet and that will help you not only commercially but educationally.
Identification of the need
The first thing is to identify the type of solution that the customer is needing.
The good thing is that we can classify any audiovisual project that you are going to find in one of the 3 groups that we are going to describe below. The really crucial thing here is to clarify what the final purpose of the project is and what your client is really needing in their daily life inhabiting the place you are designing.
1. Communication and Collaboration
They are classrooms or places where it is primarily sought to share information and knowledge collaboratively between people who are present or in remote places. Here audiovisual tools must be used to achieve more effective meetings, and improve communication and the generation of ideas in an agile, flexible and timely manner.
2. Celebrations and Entertainment
They are places where you want to create the appropriate environment so that the messages and events are captured and enjoyed by the attendees of the place, so that those who attend there, for free or paying, have a good time. The audiovisual system must generate the environment that will allow the sermon, the party, the work, or the time spent there, to arrive more naturally and obtain the desired results.
3. Setting and Emergencies
They are public places where people do not attend them because of the sound but that regardless of this require a sound intervention because they want to provide security both to the staff who work there and to the visitors through announcements and warnings. Also in these places it is a common practice to generate environments and images by playing music and even masking noise.
Equipment filtering
Then from there you need to filter the most appropriate products, because although a speaker is a speaker and an amplifier is an amplifier, each project has particular characteristics that make certain products perform better than others. That they all work, yes!, but that the degree of satisfaction of the end user when using the appropriate product is greater, There is not the slightest Doubt!, and many times it is difficult (without having much experience or the time to investigate it) to know how to identify the most suitable products, which will not necessarily make the project more expensive. This is the scientific part! We will tell you how to do it more easily!
Selection of alternatives
A tool that helps you select the products in a logical order, carrying the natural flow of sound will make it easier for you to understand the concept, even in types of projects that you have never worked on before. If the tool is complemented by descriptions of the equipment based on its benefits rather than on the technical part, it will help you to make a more artistic choice of the products that were previously filtered by the "scientific" part. Let yourself be carried away by your intuition, and by what you learned about your client during interviews. Do not be afraid of error, select what you think your client will live and really enjoy, have empathy, usually and imagine.
Project Landing
Without really having realized, I have already passed the most difficult part of the design, the selection of products that has been made, even if you have some configuration errors, what you have now already selected comes with so much essential information that very surely if you had developed the project differently you would not have come to the surface these aspects.
If here you approach someone with more in-depth knowledge about the selected systems, they can refine this design and give you some specific advice much more agile and easily, and without realizing it you have developed a much more complex project in less time, and in turn you have learned, since on the next occasion it will be easier to remember the suggested optimizations.
How to improve the project?
These network tools that are designed for the realization of projects and choice of audiovisual products, are usually linked to a group of experts who upon receiving the info of selected products will give you their concept on the selection of the products you made and inform you about possible improvements or more optimal combinations.
*Juan F Montoya is UX Strategic Manager for Smart Environments in Colombia. You can contact him through [email protected]
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