Kevin Lynch Archives

Inside Macromedia

This is a view into a team meeting at Macromedia—it shows many of the team members I'm working with on a new product. The team is based in both San Francisco and Boston, with this particular gathering in Macromedia's board room.

The meeting rooms were designed to help distributed teams collaborate, and it mostly works, but still a lot to learn about remote meetings. The video systems in the far wall can show multiple locations, and the screens can also be used to project computer displays from computers plugged into ports on the table. Both sides of a meeting can control camera panning and zooming. The audio is handled by microphones embedded in the table and speakers in the ceilings. It's all IP-based and works over a high speed internet connection between our offices.

Almost everyone carries their laptop computers into meetings now—the wireless network has driven this over the past couple years. During meetings, people are present in two places at once, partly in the live meeting and partly in the virtual space of their computer. Conversations in meetings frequently happen on multiple levels in this environment, with people not only talking but also sending email and instant messaging each other, as well as sending documents and links to view during discussion. If you don't have your computer, you really miss out on parts of the meeting.

One problem with the proliferation of laptops is the table microphone design (the little black dots on the table) did not anticipate noisy fans and keyboard tapping right next to them, so meetings are commonly punctuated by "someone has their computer by a microphone!".

There's still a lot to learn about how technology can assist meetings, particularly distributed meetings. Some interesting research along these lines has been done by Microsoft Research (PDF) and Stanford's Interactive Workspaces Project.