MTRs - a place to get things done…
We don’t go into Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTRs) to have meetings. We go into meeting and teaching spaces to get things done, to make progress, to acquire new knowledge. What does this mean for the room’s design?
As technologists it’s tempting to confuse the medium with the message. It’s too easy to frame the questions that define space design as receptacles we’ll fill with vendors and their technologies. Microsoft talks about room personas, which is a great way of thinking in terms of the workflows and human activities that technology-enabled workspaces support (or are supposed to support). Honestly, day to day this part of the room design is often overlooked.
Stakeholders and budget-holders can be unreliable witnesses in the specification processes as their experiences of the meeting rooms are different to users who walk cold into the room and need to get straight to work. This why Human-Centred Design (and AVIXA's forthcoming UX Design for AV that I'm co-writing) is so important.
Meetings and teaching are performative events. We behave in these spaces in ways we wouldn’t elsewhere. We assume roles. Meetings are like church services: for a limited time we behave in certain ways, adopt common understandings. The army officer might lie awake at night consumed with imposter syndrome, but come the morning’s briefing both she and the brigade need her to play the part.
Room design influences behaviours. High-backed chairs without arms or castors speak to the seriousness of the meeting about to take place. They stop the movements that are so distracting to remote participants.
The room design can convey status and even power to remote participants in the way that configuration, finishes and VC cameras are combined, looking through the lens (literally!) of remote participants.
This all speaks to the fact that room design is a process that has to be carefully curated, that the technology specification is an outcome of these processes - and not its driver.
Posted: 4th March 2024