Changing room names and unexpected socio-technical complexity
This is a very short story about the socio-technical complexities of what seems on the surface to be ‘simple’. As organisations deploy more and more technologies, these complexities deepen, ‘simple’ becomes slower and harder.
Before ACMIX was established and we moved in in early 2016, the majority of ACMI’s staff worked out of offices on Oliver Lane. Spread over three floors of a building, we were able to book meetings in meeting rooms whose names corresponded to the floors that they were on — 5A, 5B, 4A, 4B, 4C.
When we moved into the single floor of ACMIX those names were simply carried forward. 5A, originally the largest meeting room in Oliver Lane was simply applied to the largest room in ACMIX. For ‘legacy users’ — existing staff — this was entirely logical. For new staff and our new ACMIX co-workers the nomenclature was meaningless but became, over time, accepted as ‘culture’.
Towards the end of 2016 we ran a poll internally to come up with new names for the meeting rooms. The new names were to speak to ACMIs institutional focus as the national museum of film, tv, videogames, digital culture and art. Many locations from film, TV, and videogames were suggested and voted on. We discarded the obvious Harry Potter names as we wanted names of fictional places known primarily from screen media. And thus we ended up with new names like Thunderdome, Los Santos, Mushroom Kingdom. The new names were added to the signage on the rooms alongside the signs for their old names. So 5A simply became ‘Thunderdome 5A’. This naming was done so that existing users could keep their old mental models of our workspace intact as they transitioned to the new naming.
This double-barrelled naming was also replicated in Microsoft Exchange which manages our email and calendaring. This had a more technical driver — mostly so that the multitude of forward scheduled repeating meetings would not need to be rebooked or migrated to ‘new’ rooms. This is an example of how digital architectures can bake in ways of operating by the design of their systems and databases — which are mostly opaque to the average user.
Fast forward two years and finally the double-barrelled nomenclature is gone. At the very end of 2018, new signage was made and the rooms are now singularly known by their (not so) new names.
Often in the cultural sector and public sector we think about change that is something that is decreed, documented, implemented, and done. But all change is contextual. Something as simple as changing the names by which meeting rooms are known, and booked, is a good barometer of the pace of change. Interestingly, the digital representations of those meeting rooms were the easiest to change, but ended up being the last to change. In fact I still get invited to meetings that occur in 5A, simply because the old names are cached in the calendaring software on staff smartphones or desktops.
