The client Festival Plaza Tower establishes a new identity for Flinders University in the heart of Adelaide. This modern and innovative vertical campus is set to foster collaboration and empower learning opportunities.
The challenge:
Paradigm shifts are by nature disruptive. It’s always nice to be on, or ahead of, the curve. The nightmare is to be left with comparatively new systems that are stuck in an outdated generation of working or technology. Surely, this is every university AV architect’s worst nightmare. Not only do you have to ride the wave of technology shifts but pedagogical shifts as well. Prior to the design and fitout, the Flinders University AV team standardised on a number of platforms that would best dovetail with the prevailing teaching pedagogy. First up: lecture theatres are dead. Every space is flat floor. The rooms are flexible, with almost nothing nailed down. The lecturer has a station to plug in their laptop – HDMI for BYOD connectivity and USB/HDMI for the Room PC for conferencing capabilities. Flinders University’s Senior IDS Technical Lead, Leigh Hoppenbrouwers: “All our rooms are designed to be collaborative and flexible, and we have one code base. Speciality rooms, such as the moot court or the boardroom, share the same code, only with aspects added or subtracted. The moot court, for example, has 12 extra channels of wireless and extra displays to simulate a courtroom experience. It means that teaching can happen in any location, and the lecturer will be confident of their ability to work within those spaces.”
The solution:
In its lecture spaces, Flinders University installed a combination of TeamConnect Ceiling 2 microphones and SpeechLine Digital Wireless (SL DW) handheld and lapel microphones. Daniel Rowe, Business Development Manager at Sennheiser said, “Sennheiser’s been at the forefront of transducer manufacture for approaching 80 years now, so we have a vast amount of experience capturing and reproducing the human voice, whether that be in the recording studio right through to a boardroom or lectern.” Leigh Hoppenbrouwers and Oliver Taylor, the Service Delivery Manager from Diversified which won the tender as installer and systems integrator on the project, lay out the main design decisions and how it’s all working out.
