Along with our annual Top 50 Systems Integrators feature, we polled a selection of leading firms on industry topics.
SCN: What kind of challenges and successes have you experienced while working with experience designers?
Jim Colquhoun, CTS-I, CTS-D, VP/Chief Technologist, Avidex
Avidex has a history of successful design, user-experience projects, and working with experience designers. Our success in working with experience designers comes first from investing in the time to listen and clearly understand the end-goals of all the players from the client, various end-users, and the greater goal(s) of the project.
Jeff Irvin, Principal, Spinitar
I believe our role in working with experience designers is not inhibiting or limiting their ability to create an extraordinary experience, but enabling their creativity to pull off something even beyond their expectation. Don’t keep them in check, but work as a team to do what might be unthinkable!
Philip Giffard, President, Integration Division, Solotech
Most experience designers are educated about technologies now, and, therefore, it is easier to communicate with them, to meet their expectations, and to deliver a quality project. As experts in the AV world, we have to make it easy for them. They wish to see an effect—an ambiance or a mood as an end result—but do not necessarily focus on the technical aspects of it. Thanks to our Live Productions Division, which makes many great events and music tours yearly, we also master the “Backstage” notion and the “wow” effect targeted by our clients.
Michael V. DiBella, Vice President of Marketing, IVCi
The challenge is that often a designer does not fully integrate real world/environmental factors into his/her designs; this results in proposing ideas that are creative and cool, but lack a practicality that will enable the solution to be fully adopted. On the flip side, we have leveraged their creativity and innovation to bring newer technologies into more spaces. Partnering with experience designers has given our design team very out-of-the-box lessons on how to approach and solve the collaboration issues our customers face.
Michael Fornander, CEO, Neurilink
Neurilink employs full-time audio visual design engineers who stay current on the latest in technologies within our industry and those that we interface with. This staffing allows us great success interacting with other industry design teams.
Click here to see the SCN Top 50 2018.
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