Humans are addicted to trying to figure out what’s going on in their world. A lot of that sleuthing happens during meetings. Recently, many have been pondering the image of a meeting at Mar-a-Lago related to an American military strike in Syria, shown here: www.cnn.com. The CNN headline is indicative of our intrinsic curiosity: “What This Photo of Trump’s War Room Tells Us.”
Trump’s gathering is attracting a lot more attention than many meetings do, but the same sorts of analyses take place at every one. “Who’s sitting where?” and “How is the meeting room designed?” are perennial questions. The first one gets at individual/social dynamics, who has what kind of power now, for example, and the second is ferretting out information at a slightly higher level. It probes, “what does this organization value?”
Analyzing who means what to Trump, who sits in the leader position at the head of a rectangular table, is complicated by the fact that some people were participating in the session remotely. People are seated behind Trump, so their roles seem less important, and their power less; the president can’t make eye contact with them. If you scroll down on the linked webpage, above, you’ll see a photo taken during the Bin Laden raid. In that second photo, Obama does not sit at the head of the table but off to the side, probably with a view of nearly everyone in the room.
The table is fundamentally rectangular in both the Trump and Obama lead sessions, but that is nearly inevitable in most meeting spaces. Meeting rooms generally can’t accommodate truly leaderless round tables of sufficient size for sessions with more than a few people. And, the organization culture specific question that underlies the design of meeting rooms is, “Will meetings have leaders or not?” In reality, most will.
One of the most striking differences between the Obama and Trump images is that the furnishings in the Obama image communicate “power” and “authority” – note the high backed chair and greater number of wooden surfaces, for example. Trump’s meeting room, at Mar-a-Lago, which it must be acknowledged was not initially built as a secure government installation, features the sorts of relatively flimsy, uncomfortable chairs that abound at wedding receptions and a narrow table that looks like it may be covered with a cloth and used during those same receptions as a drop off point for gifts. A lamp that seems like it might be found in a home is visible. The elements in the Trump space do not signal “strength” and “respect” the way the furnishings in the other image do. It is important to reiterate, however, that the space for the Obama meeting was designed initially with a very different purpose than the one where the Trump meeting was held.
People from around the world have seen the photos of the presidential gatherings during the Bin Laden- and the Syria-related events. Conference rooms, etc., rarely get this much attention. The people who encounter them are always assessing how these spaces are used and designed, however. What they learn affects how they think and behave. Actively considering, during the design process, the silent conversations spaces will have with the people that encounter them insures that workplace design furthers clients’ goals and objectives.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.