Unhinged meeting room names

2H Media

The well-known difficulty of naming things explains why so many things have bad names. The worst examples often come in sets, because someone wanted related names for a collection of related things.

Places

Place names inevitably cause confusion unless you use sufficiently abstract names. If you can’t come up with good names, try indulging in unhinged naming.

Unhinged place names:

1. districts of the city – including areas you might reasonably go to for a work event
2. cities – where you might plausibly have other offices
3. countries — especially if people travel internationally to visit clients.

You can safely use the names of astronomical bodies – planets, moons and asteroids, unless you work in the space industry.

Cardinal directions

Compass directions don’t often occur as venue names, but have the advantage of additional levels of precisions and standard abbreviations, e.g. Northeast Room (NE).

Unhinged compass direction names:

1. directions from reception – as a sequence of compass directions, e.g N-W-NE-S
2. the exact direction from reception – using 32 points of the compass, e.g. northeast by north (NEbN), after rebuilding the office to make these names/directions unique
3. directions from a bigger meeting room – to name small meeting rooms based on their direction from larger rooms, e.g. you get to Northeast by North by going north from room Northeast.

Example: South By Southwest a.k.a. SXSW (conference rather than meeting room).

People

Using people’s names introduces a deliberate category error to make them unambiguous meeting room names. You can use fictional characters’ locations to make them more memorable, e.g. Santa’s Grotto or King Arthur’s Castle.

Unhinged people’s names:

1. common employee given names – e.g. Nicolas and Anna
2. famous people – e.g. Einstein’s office
3. employee of the month – rename a meeting room after the latest winner, every month.

If you don’t mind a pretentious option, name meeting rooms after famous painters, and hang a print of their most famous work on the wall.

Colours

Colour names continue the progression to more abstract meeting room names.

Unhinged colour names:

1. obscure CSS colour names – e.g. Burly wood (light brown) and Gainsboro (light grey)
2. hexadecimal RGB values – e.g. call the teal room #088, and Gainsboro #dcdcdc
3. garish colours – e.g. Hot Pink, and paint the walls, ceiling and floor to match

To play it safe, decorate rooms according to their names, e.g. yellow objects in the Yellow Room.

Symbols

Symbols could work, provided that everyone knows how to pronounce them.

Unhinged (unpronounceable) symbol names:

1. runes
2. kanji
3. hazard class pictograms – other hazard symbols

You could safely use certain emoji, in the same way that car parks often name their sections like 🚁 Helicopter, so your children can tell you where you parked. Chemical elements, and their standard two-letter abbreviations, might also work.

Numbers

You can use numbers as unique names, called nominative numbers, as long as you choose memorable ones.

Unhinged numerical names:

1. UUID – e.g. D266FF16-2C2F-4237-99A6-4445C1B6708D
2. exact meeting room latitude-longitude – e.g. 51.17887234, -1.82618255
3. meeting room volume (in millilitres)

The most boring meeting room names combine a floor number and room number, either separated like 2.10, or in hotel-style room numbers like 210. You’ll see this kind of naming if you work in the space industry, so you don’t have to worry about meeting rooms named after cute asteroid names, in practice.