This morning’s meeting, once again taken with Magic Minutes, was in one of our favourite meeting rooms. A lot of thought has gone in to this – right down to a Y-Shaped table that was designed especially for the company (by Top-Tec).
It works amazingly well. If you’ve read our other post about long rectangular tables with a screen at the end, then you will know we are not really fans. This though gets a lot of those problems fixed. For a start, instead of a monitor at the end, there is a HD projector (just as £500 Benq one) and the image is crystal clear and 150″ across the diagonal. No problems reading this from the back
The clever bit is the table shape though. For a large group you have the splayed effect that you see on similar ‘Trapezoid’ designs – so that everyone gets a clear line of sight to the screen and can still talk to each other. A presenter can stand at the front and can see everyone’s eyes.
The table can be used differently for smaller groups though. For a face to face meeting, you use the rectangular end where you don’t need to see the screen as much, but you like being opposite the other attendees. For a smaller presentation meeting you use the Y-end, where you can all see the screen and each other at the same time.
As with all designs, it doesn’t cope with the ‘looking through people’s heads’ problem when everyone is side by side. This is better solved by a circular or at least oval table, but these aren’t so good for looking at the screen.
It was a good meeting though, and once again minutes and actions came out instantly by email and progress on previous actions had been chased up automatically prior to the meeting so we got a lot of them closed off. Good combination then of room/furniture design and great software.
