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Space-Driven Design

Overview

Designing sites in Cognio follows a different process than most other systems. You start by creating spaces to organize your processing, rather than by choosing hardware.

This is a deliberate departure from virtually every other platform, where the first question is "what hardware am I using?" In Cognio, the first question is "what spaces do I have?"

What Is a Space?

A site file can contain multiple spaces. A space can represent any organizational need, but most commonly it represents a room or physical space, such as an office, a gym, or a classroom.

Each space has its own independent signal flow. At the same time, spaces are not isolated from one another:

  • Audio can be transferred between spaces.
  • Control can be transferred between spaces, so a touchscreen or remote can control parameters in any or all spaces.

So while spaces share audio and control where you want them to, they remain independent from a design standpoint, and independent from an online/offline standpoint as well.

Design Before You Commit to Hardware

Because design starts with spaces, you can do a great deal of work before choosing any hardware. A new space is not tied to a specific product. It is shown as an unspecified Cognio device until you decide what will run it.

This lets you:

  • Work through most of the design before committing to a particular product.
  • Change your mind as you go.
  • Decide on hardware at the beginning of the process or at the end.

For example, you might run every space on a single C100 server, or assign a C20 to a space that needs more processing while every other space runs on a touchscreen. The choice is yours, and you can make or change it at any point in the design.

Independent Online and Offline Status

Each space can be pushed online or taken offline independently, even when several spaces run on the same piece of hardware.

In practice, this means you can leave the office and gym online and in use, for a meeting and a basketball game, while you take the classroom offline to make and push changes, all without affecting the audio in the other spaces.

For a hands-on tour of working with spaces, see the Cognio DesignOps Walkthrough.