Control Room Design

When you partner with BAW Architecture, the world’s leading control room design consultants, you access unsurpassed expertise in control room design, and it all starts in one place: with your operators. Our approach is operator-centric because the day-to-day realities of how the operator functions lies at the heart of the control center. Understanding the operator’s needs—how they interface with complex systems within a high-pressure environment—is square one, and all other design decisions flow out from that central point.

30 Years of Control Room Design Expertise

Our control room (also known as an operations center, or an operations control center) design portfolio spans 30 years, and includes over 100 new-build or renovation projects completed around the globe, for clients such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Fluor, and Honeywell.

The Sum of its Parts

Designing a control room is like conducting a symphony with different sections for strings, brass, woodwind and percussion. Great control room design assembles different elements into a harmonious whole. The different control room design criteria that need to be considered to optimize utility are:

• Lighting
• Glare reduction
• Acoustics
• Console design
• Furniture design
• Material finishes
• Human-machine interaction
• Fatigue mitigation
• Human factors/Ergonomics

The risk of an abnormal situation escalation is always present in a control room. A state-of-the-art control room gives the operators the ability to return the situation to normal in the shortest amount of time possible, because the human-machine interface is approached holistically. Dozens of factors are taken into account, such as the orientation of consoles, screen information, noise reduction, slip resistance, arc of reach, line of sight, clutter mitigation, manual placement—all of these have the potential to improve or degrade the operator’s reaction time. At BAW, attention is paid to understanding and optimizing each factor of the control room layout down to the finest detail. Learn more about the 12 reasons why BAW is the industry leader in control room design.

Safety and the Bottom Line in Process Control Room Design

Unsafe, unproductive work environments are in the end very costly on a number of different fronts. For example, if an offshore oil platform fails to integrate best practices to avoid an explosion, the result can be a spill. This costs money, but more importantly, it can cost lives and damage the environment. A catastrophic event, such as an oil spill, can be avoided by employing best practices in control building design. We integrate architectural, interior design and human factors elements to deliver the safest, most productive, and most durable workspaces in the petrochemical, mining, utilities and transportation industries.

The upfront investment pays off for our clients every time. Learn more about why BAW Architecture is the leading 24/7 mission-critical control building design, or contact us to start a conversation.