Name things unambiguously

Nacho Capelo

Someone I know recently received an invitation to speak at an academic conference with ‘Congress Helsinki 2025’ in its name. The letter also contained practical information, and the location:

The session will be held on 03/04/2025, from 09:00 to 10:00 in Copenhagen*.

They didn’t expect a Helsinki conference to have lectures in Copenhagen. International collaborations sometimes complicate things, but a mistake in the invitation letter would also explain a location in another country.

They double-checked the location, before deciding whether to book a flight to Finland or Denmark. It turns out that the conference venue has named the meeting room ‘Copenhagen’.

Naming difficulty

Despite the well-known difficulty of naming things, naming a meeting room after a location fails unnecessarily badly. The ambiguity will inevitably create confusion.

I have also experienced meeting room confusion, while working for a company that named their Berlin office meeting rooms after Berlin districts. This didn’t usually cause problems, although a ‘team meeting in Tiergarten’ could plausibly refer going to Café am Neuen See after work.

However, asking after a colleague who happens to live in Prenzlauerberg makes ‘in Prenzlauerberg’ ambiguous. You don’t know whether to look for them in the meeting room, or contact them at home. Next, you’ll tell someone that, ‘they didn’t come to the office today’.

Bad naming

As with all naming problems, start by not naming things badly - ambiguously in this case.

• Place names give you a nice set of names to choose from, but Copenhagen and Tiergarten create ambiguity that doesn’t encumber, say, asteroids or fictional prisons.
• Cute themes for meeting rooms, such as The monkey cage (not made up!), become awkward or embarrassing before long.

Instead, you should at least manage to do better than:

• concise and unique (but boring) names - when you call the third meeting room on the second floor MR 2.3
• hotel rooms, like Room 203 - only slightly less boring
• famous people’s names - not ambiguous, but can result in sentences you want to never have to say out loud (‘you’ll find me in…’).

Alternatively, when facing a multiple-naming problem like this, you can reuse a name collection you already have.

Context ambiguity

Tableair writes that creating meeting room names ‘offers a unique opportunity to reflect a company’s culture, values, and creativity’. For example, in 2018 I ran an XP Days Benelux workshop at a Dutch hotel whose MeetingDesign Team has chosen meeting room names that align with their MeetingSuccess goal. Translated, they include:

• The Cooperation
• The Experience
• The Creativity
• The Inspiration
• The Interaction
• The Challenge

The definite articles make these names stand out in sentences like, ‘I’ll see you after lunch in The Inspiration’ (you can hear the emphasis). No doubt they also perform well in their target market.

Despite this sophistry, these don’t sound like meeting room names. Plucking names from a different context, such as meeting goals, creates this different kind of ambiguity. In domain-driven design terms, these names reuse domain language from bounded context in another.

Good naming

Good names require more than avoiding ambiguity, in practice. Worse, you cannot easily rename meeting rooms, so you probably only have one chance to get it right. Either way, some naming problems deserve some thought about what good looks like.

* not the real date and time