52 SOLUTIONS: GSK SHOPPER SCIENCE LAB, BRENTFORD August 2014
it was plain sailing, though. “It’s always difficult on these large builds to get an honest picture from the main contractor regarding when they will really be ready for us. We probably got onto site earlier than we should have done – perhaps by a month – but we were told things were ready when they weren’t.”
Cook had anticipated Meetings, meetings
This was an unusual project for me because I generally only get to experience installations around or after the time of completion. For the Shopper Science Lab, thanks to Visual Acuity, I was able to attend some of the project meetings and get a much earlier and more detailed insight into the processes involved in major AV installation projects. In November 2012 I attended a meeting
between Visual Acuity (represented by Blair Parkin and Duncan Howie) and Pope Wainwright (George Wainwright, Lewis Mitchell and Sarah Lawes) at the latter’s office in north London. PW was responsible for the aesthetic design and Visual Acuity for the functional design. At this point, GSK had delivered a functional brief, from which Visual Acuity had subdivided the available space into different rooms, including the collaboration room, the focus group room, the viewing room and reception. The main purpose of this meeting was to review the proposed layouts of the various spaces. Parkin reflected: “The client’s workflow document now has more than 30 workflow streams on it – this will have to come down, as the space is not large enough. The issue is not the number per se, it’s what some of those things are. This is not a meeting space, it’s a decision space.” Questions raised in this meeting included: Is the floor plan locked down yet? Can we fit everything we want to into the collaboration room? Is it possible to have modular furniture, or otherwise hide furniture somewhere when it’s not needed? Is the client overstating the numbers of people that will typically use certain rooms? A few weeks later, in January 2013, a major meeting at GSK’s facility in North Mymms, Hertfordshire (pictured) brought together most of the project team: as well as Visual Acuity and Pope Wainwright
(from which, respectively, Blair Parkin and Tim Pope led the meeting), there were representatives from GSK (including Russell Barrow, IT director, responsible for the delivery of the lab; Crispin Haywood, who would take over the running of the lab once it opened, and representatives from product development and category management; CDS, the main contractor; and project manager Matt Homewood. This meeting, which lasted a day and
a half, was described as a last chance to raise outstanding issues. Questions raised included: Can we have an operational walkthrough of the lab to work out what is stored where, what is mounted where, is there enough turning space for a pallet truck here? Do we need to consider occasionally combining these two spaces? And how can we stop natural light from entering the collaboration room when the touchscreen wall is being used? (This was later solved, says Parkin, with “a good old design team compromise”. The window was retained, and a very high-quality blackout blind has been integrated – so that it doesn’t look like a blind has been pulled over the window when the videowall is being used.) Finally, I attended a third meeting at GSK House in Brentford, west London in March 2013, a short distance from the Lab. Construction had begun on the Lab, and so as well as getting an update on design decisions I was able to tour the site – although at that stage a large amount of imagination was needed to envisage the facility that it was to become. What attending these meetings brought home to me was the sheer degree of planning, and the levels of budgeting and decision-making, that can go into AV projects – particularly when the client starts with only a faint idea of what is wanted. But it’s clear from the success of the Shopper Science Lab that all of this was time well spent.
this, however. “Rather than having a big team hit the project in a short period of time I had a fairly small team working alongside the other contractors, getting what they could done, and they could give me constant updates on where the site was rather than how it was perceived to be.” Most of the time there were four or five people on site working under Cook, rising to eight at the busiest times. There was a degree of
slippage on the project: originally due to open in May 2013, the facility actually began its work in October. Most of this delay, says Parkin, was due to lease issues that deferred the start of construction. He also looks back fondly on the Shopper Science Lab. “It was a terribly good- natured project. Everyone wanted it to succeed. It was slightly odd – there was an absurdly short timescale, but with very passionate people, and everyone caught the passion and we made it happen across the whole project.” That’s not to say it was
entirely free from tension. “In every project with a high degree of esoteric design and functional design, and different consultants representing those things, there’s always tension between form and function. This project was no different in that regard, but what made it easier was that we
were simulating real-world environments.”
Lighting decisions took a lot of hard work, he says, but this is par for the course: “On almost every project, lighting is one of the most challenging areas, because you’re crossing disciplines between theatrical and effects lighting, building architectural lighting and safety lighting, and they’re normally represented by three different sets of people. If you don’t work hard, you end up with three separate systems, which no client wants on a project like this.” Overall, Parkin says the
project was “ambitious in every possible way. The only way you can achieve something like that is if the project team are equally ambitious, but the key thing was it had executive backing to the hilt because it was looking to be a huge business generator, and that’s proved to be true.” Barrow elaborates:
“The real proof of the Lab has been in its adoption. Global marketing teams can make more decisions in an afternoon than they could previously in a couple of months.” I guess if you want to be the leader in fast-moving consumer healthcare, it’s important to be able to move fast.
www.amx.com www.barco.com www.clearone.com www.cyviz.com www.gsk.com www.iiyama.com www.milestone-system.com www.pro.bose.com www.pro.sony.eu www.popewainwright.co.uk www.qsc.com www.reddotsquare.com www.samsung.com/business www.sharp.eu www.shure.eu www.u-touch.co.uk www.visual-acuity.com
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