It’s All in the Details

After talking to meeting planners and staff, and observing the behavior of people when they meet, Sentry Centers is applying dozens of tweaks, large and small, to its newest meeting space in Manhattan’s 32 Old Slip building.

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and Fazio both have been focused on design research for more than two decades, and their collective experience makes them “pretty well versed in group work,” Bromberg said, “and what it means to make for a great collaboration or great meeting or a great conference from a space point of view, from a technology point of view, and from a process and culture point of view. And we feel strongly that all of those things have to be in sync.” As they collaborated on the design of the new

conference-center space at 32 Old Slip, Bromberg and Fazio conducted research focused on the expe- rience of users at Sentry’s existing centers. “We spent a lot of time talking to external-meeting plan- ners and talking to attendees,” Bromberg said. “We talked to every staff member at Sentry. We looked

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at it from everybody’s point of view — the user, the server, the meeting planner — and we tried to design it so everybody has a great experience.” That didn’t mean dragging staff into empty conference rooms, but talking to them where they’re actually working. “That helps to trigger thoughts,” Brom- berg said, “and allows the interviewer to ask ques- tions that get deeper to the heart of the matter.” Their methodology, which Bromberg described

as “ask, observe, and engage,” is designed to uncover users’ needs at a number of levels. Ask- ing people directly what they want only gets you so far, Bromberg said. It doesn’t unearth implicit needs — which are needs that people know they have but don’t articulate, because they are second nature. Observing both meetings and the work

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