Tom Young Center for Research and Innovation

Aiken, SC

The Future of Aiken’s Economy

When the City of Aiken set out to build a downtown home for research, industry and education, the goal was never just a building. The Tom Young Center for Research and Innovation, named for South Carolina State Senator Tom Young, Jr., was conceived as a working ecosystem: a place where national laboratory scientists, university faculty, entrepreneurs, business leaders and community members could occupy the same address and, more importantly, the same conversation.

The three-story facility is the product of a joint partnership between the City of Aiken and Aiken Corporation. The first floor is dedicated to gathering and public engagement, anchored by the 3,750-square-foot Catalyst Hall, the 850-square-foot Strategy Suite, and 2,600 square feet housing USC Aiken’s Aiken Energy & Innovation Exchange (AEIX) and its pre-function area. The second and third floors are occupied by the Savannah River National Laboratory, extending the lab’s presence into the heart of downtown with offices, huddle spaces, a full training room and an executive conference room.

Cheatham Fletcher Scott Architects and the City of Aiken selected dB Integrations as the AV design firm for the project. dB Integrations worked alongside Allen Batchelor Construction to engineer and install audio-visual systems throughout the building.

The Challenge

A facility with this many stakeholders presents an interesting challenge: one building, three organizations, and an enormous range of use cases — from a 276-guest gala in Catalyst Hall to a two-person huddle on the third floor to a classified-adjacent research discussion in an executive conference room.

Several requirements shaped the design:

Flexibility without complexity. The first-floor spaces needed to operate independently on a busy day with three simultaneous events, then combine into larger configurations for conferences and community gatherings without an AV technician standing by to reconfigure the building.

A consistent user experience. A visiting researcher, a city staff member, a USCA student and a nonprofit renting the hall for an evening would all touch the same systems. Every room needed to behave the same way, whatever the scale may be.

Presentation credibility. As the region’s “front door” for innovation, the center hosts governors, industry executives and national laboratory leadership. Image and audio quality had to hold up under that kind of attention.

Acoustic performance in open work areas. The upper floors combine private offices with large open-office areas where staff discuss sensitive research. Speech privacy and distraction control were as important as any display.

A single, serviceable platform. With multiple owners and operators sharing the building, the AV infrastructure needed to be centrally managed, expandable and supportable for the long term.

dB Integrations standardized the entire facility on QSC’s Q-SYS platform, using it for system control, audio processing, amplification and distributed loudspeakers throughout the building. A single ecosystem handles every space, which means one control philosophy, one point of service and a clear path for future expansion.

First Floor: Gathering Spaces

Catalyst Hall, the Strategy Suite and the USCA AEIX space each received full Q-SYS-based audio systems with distributed speakers, paired with MAX-HUB displays for presentation and collaboration. Catalyst Hall adds an 8′ x 14′ LED video wall, giving the signature venue a large-format image that reads clearly from anywhere in the room and holds up under full house lighting. Every first-floor room can run as a standalone space or be combined with adjacent spaces, with audio and video routing following the room configuration.

Second and Third Floors: Savannah River National Laboratory

Multiple huddle spaces are equipped with MAX-HUB displays using Miracast, so staff and visitors can share content wirelessly without adapters, cables or a learning curve. Throughout the large open-office areas, Cambridge Sound noise masking systems raise the acoustic floor to protect speech privacy and reduce distraction.

The second floor also houses two of the building’s most demanding rooms. A fully equipped large training room supports workforce development and technical instruction. The executive conference room uses Shure MXA ceiling microphone arrays paired with ceiling loudspeakers and a MAX-HUB display — a fully ceiling-mounted approach that keeps the table clear and delivers even, natural voice pickup for remote participants, wherever people sit.

Across all three floors, the design intent was the same: the technology should be immediately usable by someone who has never been in the room before.

Making the Mission Operational

The Tom Young Center was designed to connect research, industry and education, and to serve as a focal point for innovation, workforce development and entrepreneurship while maintaining a high profile in the community. The AV systems are what make that mission operational day to day.

The Result

A regional conference fills Catalyst Hall in the morning, breaks into concurrent sessions in the Strategy Suite and AEIX space by midday, and reopens into a single room for an evening reception all without a cart of borrowed equipment or a call for help. A research team on the third floor pulls a colleague into a huddle space and shares a screen in seconds. An executive briefing runs with remote participants who can hear every voice at the table clearly. And in the open offices, staff can work and talk without broadcasting their conversations across the floor.

For every visitor — the student touring AEIX, the entrepreneur pitching in the Strategy Suite, the national laboratory researcher hosting collaborators from across two states — the experience is the same: walk in, connect, and get to work. That reliability is the quiet infrastructure behind a building built for collaboration.