The Room Still Matters

Lately my feeds are full of people saying the same thing:

• “We’re seeing the response to the loneliness epidemic.”

• “IRL is back.”

• “Experiential is the future.”

As if it ever left. There are a lot of us who know and have seen otherwise.

I spent the last fifteen years inside big tech. The moments that mattered most didn’t happen on a screen.

One of those roles was leading the team that designed and ran the in-person experience for Google Glass.

People applied on Twitter for the chance to buy it. Then they flew themselves to San Francisco or New York. Booked a hotel. Took time off work. All to sit in a room and have it placed on their face.

The first few minutes of what we called a “fitting” were usually quiet. People smiled before they asked questions. They could feel the vibrations on their face. They’d look into the little prism screen and laugh a bit, almost involuntarily.

It really did feel like the future for a moment.

That hour in the basecamp (space) with the Glass Explorers (customers) and Glass Guides (staff) was the product. Yes, we all really put our backs into the whole expedition branding.

Charging wires hung from the ceiling. The concrete floors were polished and raw. Workshop tables smelled like fresh-cut wood.

It was peak 2010s tech design. Google was growing out of its primary color childhood and into the plywood and grey era every coffee shop eventually copied.

We had to decide everything:

• parking and elevator access inside an office building

• what they saw first

• what we said before they even unboxed it

• how to explain something that didn’t have language yet

None of that lived in the software. It lived in the room.

At the time, Glass was everywhere. It was poised to be the future.

And then people started wearing it in public. And the public… didn’t love it. “Glassholes,” they called them.

It wasn’t just a branding problem. The product itself still felt unfinished. You couldn’t just pick it up and understand it.

The fitting itself was awkwardly intimate. We had to adjust the nose bridge on a stranger’s face and help them angle it correctly while they stared into a mirror. It was part technical support, part optometry appointment, part first friend-date. 

Most people asked the same first question: “So, what does it do?” After flying across the country and paying $1,500.

We walked them through everything: 

• how to swipe along the side to move forward

• how to go back

• how to close out

• how to use their voice (pre AirPod and Apple Watch era) without feeling ridiculous

It wasn’t intuitive. It wasn’t obvious. 

That hour sitting at the fitting table wasn’t a luxury. It was the only way it worked. The room wasn’t amplifying the product; it was compensating for it. We weren’t just showing people Glass. We were helping them imagine what it could be. 

And, for a while, that was enough. Until it wasn’t.

Once the focus shifted from Explorers to the broader public, you could feel the energy (had already) shifted. The questions became less curious and more practical. Did people actually need this? 

For $1,500, most decided they didn’t.

Years later, I was doing executive briefing work at Salesforce.

Different product(s). Different company. Similar experiential focus.

We were hosting C-suite customers atop the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. Executives from both companies would imagine the future together in an epic space built to guide and facilitate these important conversations.

Then came the pandemic.

Everyone was on Zoom. And we were, too. Until we weren’t.

It was the summer of 2021. Downtown San Francisco still felt abandoned …on top of the June gloom that SF is known for.

Grocery stores had taped lines on the floor for six feet of distancing. Parks had painted circles in the grass so people wouldn’t sit too close together. 

Walking into these premiere conference rooms during that period felt incorrect; like we were re-entering the world before the world had decided it was ready.

We were used to hosting upwards of ten customer groups a day, and now we were all working an all-hands-on-deck situation for one in-person group of two people for that entire month.

A job that usually revolved around seating, lighting, food, room flow, and executive schedules suddenly involved daily meetings with Health & Security teams. We tracked local regulations alongside customer arrivals.

Customers and staff would arrive an hour early to get COVID tested inside the building. Then everyone waited, masked and distanced, for results before going upstairs together.

Six people sitting every five seats apart at a conference table built for twenty.

Any cough or allergy sniffle immediately changed the energy.

And strangely, the meetings often improved. The slide presentations got shorter. People seemed less interested in performance and slide-deck-hell and more interested in actually talking to each other. 

Eight-hour agendas became one-hour conversations. Everyone cut closer to the real issue(s). 

Around that same time, there was a lot of talk about VR meetings. The Metaverse. Headsets replacing conference rooms.

I kept thinking about Glass. The assumption was the same: that better technology would replace the need to be in the same room.

It didn’t then. It didn’t now.

The technology kept changing. The need for a room never did.

The irony is that the part of tech everyone is now trying to “bring back,” is the part that always moved things forward.

Not the platform. Not the interface. Not the scale.

The room. The people. The conversation.

That’s where decisions happened. That’s where trust was built. That’s what people remember.

In person, people think differently. A pause doesn’t feel like a technical issue. It feels intentional. 

People stand up. Walk around. Scribble on post-its and a whiteboard. Laugh over each other.

Someone makes a joke that isn’t in the deck. Someone else FaceTimes their family because the view from the room is too beautiful not to share. 

Something happens to people when they can smile into another person’s smiling eyes.

You can build a lot online. You can distribute, automate, optimize. Content is (still) the GD deck. Experience is what’s happening in people’s heads, hearts, and bodies while the deck is being presented.

You can’t shortcut what happens when people are actually in the same room. That’s not nostalgia. It’s function. 

People don’t remember the product. 

They remember how it felt to be there.