AV Industry Initiatives
Tim Cape and Technitect are involved in a number of industry initiatives including:
 Tim Cape, CTS-D is co-author of the book Audiovisual Best Practices: The Design and Integration Process for the AV and Construction Industries. This important work is the first of its kind in the AV industry, providing a guide to the process of integrating pro AV systems into buildings. It covers how AV fits into the design and construction process and including information for AV professionals as well as architects, engineers, contractors, facility owners and AV managers. The book has been published by InfoComm International. The book is available for purchase under "AV Merchandise" from the InfoComm store or contact us.
 The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) has been working on a design guide and recommended practice documents related to lighting AV spaces entitled Fundamentals of Lighting for Videoconferencing. These documents are for use by lighting designers and others involved with lighting design for AV spaces and focus on small to mid-sized videoconferencing and presentation spaces. The Design Guide is now available from the IES store. Just search for "videoconferencing". It includes some background information, but is mostly a presentation of the criteria and design approaches for lighting single-axis videoconferencing and AV presentation spaces.
Work on the Recommended Practice document will expand upon the Design Guide and will contain a more comprehensive discussion of the fundamental issues related to lighting design for AV spaces and will encompass a more broad range of facilities. Infocomm and IES are now working together on the new document as an ANSI Standard.
 Specifications for AV systems have been written by AV professionals for decades, trying to fit into the architectural model of contract specifications. The traditional building industry model didn't match AV needs in many was, so AV specification writers — mostly independent AV consultants — improvised. While there are a lot of similarities between AV specs produced today, there are also a lot of differences. On top of that, CSI has released MasterFormat 2004 which attempted to address the evolution of various low voltage technologies such as AV and their integration into buildings.
An initiative by InfoComm's ICAT will produce a guide to writing specifications under MasterFormat with the objective of guiding the industry in dealing with MasterFormat while hopefully resulting in more consistency among AV specifications on the street. This would ultimately help integrators to be able to know what to expect in a consultant bid specification and help owners to get more apples-to-apples comparisons in bid responses.
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