Conference Room Design Tips

A conference room is not only a place where you and your company gather to discuss important business issues, it is also a display area for you to bring visitors that may be interested in doing business with your company. There are many different design styles to choose from for a conference room, and the best choice for your company is a design that is practical but also appealing.

Classroom and Theater Style

Some conference room designs do not offer a great deal of interaction for a large group. A classroom design is rows of tables and chairs pointing at the front of the room where a podium is located that the speaker would use. These kinds of setups are good for training rooms, but they can be impractical for interactive meetings.

A theater design is simply rows of chairs facing the front of the room. The front of the room can have a row of tables set up or a podium, and you may be most familiar with this arrangement from press conferences broadcast on television. This is an extremely practical setup for getting information to a large group, but it can be uncomfortable as a training room and very impractical as a meeting room.

Banquet and Conference Style

The banquet style conference room is becoming more popular as companies start to use a more team-oriented approach to meetings. The banquet design is a series of round or rectangular tables set up in a room to allow people to meet as several small groups, or one large group. A banquet style room with rectangular tables can offer a dual purpose as the tables can all be pushed together to form one large central conference table.

A conference design is the standard single table in the middle of the room design, and for business meetings and client presentations this is still a very effective setup. It allows central attention to be focused anywhere at the table, but it also offers interaction between the entire group.

Equipment

The dry erase white board is still a staple of the conference room, and it is always advisable to put a large dry erase board on each wall of the conference room. This allows presentations to be made from any part of a conference table, and it also allows groups to have their own white board during team exercises.

An audiovisual projector is also becoming common in every conference room as more people use presentations from their laptop computers to get their information across. Be sure to invest in a projector that is bright enough for the size of your conference room, and always purchase a screen to project the images on. Many people try to project images on the dry erase white board and the white boards were not designed to show clear projected images.