Huddle Room Design Ideas
Get a complete look at what makes a huddle room an effective part of the modern office experience
Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it…
Huddle Room Design Ideas that you can use
Like more creative projects, designing a huddle room is highly subjective and affected by a wide range of factors:
- organization type
- available space
- team size
- design aesthetic
- available tech
But also like many creative projects, there are certain best practices that contribute to the overall success of designing an optimized meeting space.
So keep reading for huddle room design ideas!
As collaborative spaces, huddle rooms serve an important function: teamwork. That means that even the most basic version of a huddle room needs certain features to facilitate communication and shared tasks.
Good Huddle Room Design Has a Purpose
As collaborative spaces, huddle rooms serve an important function: teamwork. That means that even the most basic version of a huddle room needs certain features to facilitate communication and shared tasks.
And while each organization will have specific needs for their huddle spaces, certain factors will remain universal.
The Antidote to the Open Office
The concept of the huddle room was born out of the open office. In a workplace without offices, cubicles, or even desks, a common problem kept recurring: it’s too open. In an open office, there just aren’t any quiet places to sit and have a private chat with teammates.
The only alternative to the hubbub of a busy office is a meeting room. But is that really necessary for a 15 to 30 minutes session between just a couple of people or a quick video meeting? Probably not.
So huddle rooms emerged as a smaller, more practical middle ground between an open office and a formal meeting room. Teammates can still get privacy and a space to work without going to all the trouble of booking an unnecessarily large meeting room. So a huddle room has to include at least these features:
- Privacy
- Shared workspace
- Connective technology
Informally Efficient
Most organizations have huddle rooms as an informal collaboration space, which means that they are free to use without a booking. This allows teams to move at their own pace and meet when there is a need, not just when there is a conference room.
The informality of the space also means that meetings don’t have to be long, drawn-out affairs. People meet either in person or remotely. They communicate. They make a decision. Everyone gets back to work and frees up the huddle room for the next team.
Ease of Use
At its core, a huddle room is a functional space. While it can and should look good, it needs to work smoothly – even effortlessly. It needs to be intuitive and simple enough that any member of any team can use the space for on-the-fly meetings and video conferences.
And it’s important to make the whole huddle space easy to use. From the furniture to the technology available, it all needs to integrate for a simple experience for everyone who uses it. It will be a lot of work upfront making sure the huddle room does what it needs to do, but it will be worth the effort as it saves time and stress over the long term.
Inspires Creativity
A huddle room’s purpose is more than just a place to meet and talk. Even in a bustling open office or a loud classroom, a team can still meet in the lobby, grab a table at a coffee shop, or use more formal meeting rooms. Therefore an ideal huddle room must do more than just facilitate a chat. They must also inspire.
So as you’re designing your huddle room it also needs to get its users’ creative juices flowing. Of course, this is a delicate balancing act between form and function. The huddle room needs to work properly as a meeting and collaboration space, but it should also be comfortable and pleasant. Like creativity itself, making an inspiring space doesn’t always come easily.
Essential Huddle Room Design Features
Lighting
With the huddle room lighting, you’re looking for the Goldilocks factor: not too dark but not too bright. It needs to be just right. However, what exactly that means for your space is up to you. Just make sure that the light is neither over-powering nor too dim to see one’s work.
And as you’re looking into lighting options, remember that indirect light is your friend. Between collaborators’ personal devices and built-in huddle room tech, direct light sources are going to cause distracting glare on screens of all sizes. Regardless of your lights’ brightness, make sure that it’s softened somehow to make the most of the light available.
Acoustics
The acoustics of your meeting space are very important, especially if you’re using it for video conferencing. Basically, your goal should be to minimize echoes and insulate the meeting space for sound with features like ceiling baffles, wall panels, and sound-deadening floors.
Sound insulation is important for a number of reasons. It prevents disruption both ways: the meeting can continue despite the hubbub of the rest of the office but the meeting’s discussion doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s work. And meetings can go on with at least a small degree of privacy.
Walls or Partitions
And on the matter of privacy, walls or partitions are an important part of a huddle room. After all, it isn’t much of a room without walls. And even in the less delineated huddle space, some form of partition or divider goes a long way to set that space aside for its assigned purpose.
Now the walls can be the pedestrian version, glass partitions, or even just a ring of plants around a table with a few chairs. The important thing is that the huddle room is an actual room.
A Writing Surface
The latest gizmos are great. A high-tech interactive whiteboard with all the bells and whistles is both useful and impressive. But sometimes you just need to write something down on the fly. And a whiteboard doesn’t go down because the WiFi is on the fritz, the power is out, or the OS is updating. (A whiteboard does run out of marker ink, however.)
Regardless of what other communication tools you might put in your huddle room, an analog writing surface is invaluable for quick, simple notes and visuals.
Huddle Room Furniture
The Form and Function of Huddle Room Furniture
Huddle room furniture comes in all shapes and sizes based on the type of room it’s supposed to be. But again, form and function are inextricably linked.
For some organizations, a huddle room is little more than a scaled-down meeting room. Others want to create a lounge or coffee shop vibe with benches or even booths. And some huddles happen in what is essentially a living room with sofas or beanbag chairs, a coffee table, and the television replaced with a video conferencing setup.
Tables
Regardless of height or surface area, the table in your collaborative space is really the center of activity. This means that the table needs to be large enough to accommodate the work being done there and accessible to everyone who needs to use it.
For this reason, most huddle rooms use something akin to a smaller conference table or dining table. High and small bar-style tables might be fine for a quick chat, but they lack the space for documents (or even multiple laptops), so most organizations opt for something a little more traditional.
Chairs
Chairs need to match the tables they will be set around. They need to have the right height to make work surfaces accessible and be comfortable enough to sit in for at least short meetings. And the length of a typical huddle might also make you want to think about
Mobility is also a major concern for huddle room chairs. Typical meeting spaces often include rolling chairs, which are both comfortable and mobile. But maybe a stationary chair would both look and work better. (After all, part of the goal of a huddle room is to make it different from meeting rooms.) Alternatively, many huddle spaces are actually booths or fixed tables with benches. These are also options, especially if communication devices are either very mobile or fixed to the huddle space within reach.
Whiteboard
There is only so much to consider when it comes to whiteboards. Basically, you’re looking for a surface that clearly displays writing on it while being easy to keep clean. For this, a typical whiteboard is often best – either fixed or on a trolley. For a little more style, you could consider a wall-mounted glass surface with light-colored background material.
Huddle Room Technology
The huddle room is a modern solution to modern communication problems, which makes technology a core part of any collaboration space. Not only does most of today’s office work occur on a device of some kind, but much of our communication is filtered through a device for remote meetings and collaborations.
Interactive Whiteboards
Referring specifically to touchscreen interactive whiteboards, these are stylish and functional additions to any meeting space. Essentially, these are massive tablets hung on the wall as a shared display with interactive capabilities.
To maximize the function of an interactive whiteboard, the device should have a built-in operating system like Android. Ideally, it would have a Windows PC too. It should have wireless capabilities – both for functional and aesthetic reasons – and ease of use. A complete device solution would also include speakers, a microphone, and a video-conferencing camera.
Plus a modern interactive whiteboard is going to be a high-definition display for media content and a centerpiece for the meeting space. Even if a big-screened version is too large for a smaller space, then a more appropriately sized touch monitor could also be used as a shared display and digital workspace.
Projectors
Projectors are versatile and low-impact additions to collaborative spaces. Though they have neither the clarity nor the low total cost of ownership (TCO) of interactive flat panels, they still make effective shared displays in the right environment. In the right lighting – and with an appropriate device – almost any flat surface can become a display.
And for a minimalist design, using a pico projector is a wonderful way to add that display with little to no impact on the environment itself. And in a dedicated space more like an actual meeting room, a fixed projector is a fairly simple way to use a digital display as necessary without fiddling with calibration each time you use it.
Here is one of our favorite short-throw projectors for huddle rooms. Or check out this fun pico projector to make available for other collaborations.
Videoconferencing Camera
From a design perspective, you’re probably going to look for one of two options in your camera: either you want something sleek and attractive or you’re going to want something invisible. And it needs to work in the way it’s intended: namely allowing for remote meetings.
Ultimately the device will have to work within the space that you have set up, and this will be both based on the space’s needs and your own tastes as a huddle room designer. Just make sure that whatever videoconferencing camera you choose, it is essential that it have at least the following features:
- Adequate field of view for the space
- A microphone that picks up users’ voices
- Integration with shared displays or devices
Here is a favorite videoconferencing camera that blends in with the environment (especially on top of an interactive whiteboards). Or we also like this one for both its unique appearance and functionality.
Learn More About Huddle Rooms
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