Cisco Design Chief: Great Collaboration Technology Should Disappear into the Experience, Podcast

By Doug Green

“If you notice the camera move, that’s our bad.”

In this Technology Reseller News podcast recorded at WebexOne in Austin, Gavin Ivester, Vice President of Design at Cisco, discusses the thinking behind Cisco’s collaboration hardware, the new Cisco Ceiling Speaker Pro and why great meeting-room technology should feel almost invisible to the user.

Cisco announced the Ceiling Speaker Pro at WebexOne as another piece of its AV-over-IP strategy for intelligent meeting rooms.

Ivester says the real value comes from how Cisco’s room components work together.

The Ceiling Speaker Pro complements the Ceiling Microphone Pro, which uses 64 microphone elements to listen selectively across a room. Combined with cameras, codecs and other devices, the system can better understand who is speaking, where they are and how audio and video should respond.

“The more you add these peripherals, the smarter the room becomes,” Ivester says.

That can also improve meeting equity.

Cisco can use precise knowledge of microphone, speaker and room locations to reinforce sound for people who may have difficulty hearing while managing timing and phasing so the amplified audio still sounds natural.

For Ivester, performance and aesthetics should not be competing goals.

Before joining Cisco, he led design at Bang & Olufsen and held senior footwear design roles at Nike and Puma. He says those experiences reinforced a philosophy of starting with function, then finding the design that expresses it.

At Cisco, that means devices that can fit naturally into spaces ranging from conference rooms to high-end professional offices without drawing unnecessary attention to themselves.

The same thinking applies to the meeting experience.

Ivester says cameras should move and frame participants without making users conscious of the mechanics taking place behind the scenes.

“The best antidote for distraction is that you don’t notice what’s happening,” he says. “You just feel like you’re part of the conversation.”

Cisco is also emphasizing platform flexibility. Its collaboration devices can support Webex as well as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet, allowing organizations to use the meeting platform they need without changing the underlying room experience.

Ivester says AI is also changing the design profession itself.

Designers are increasingly thinking less about placing every pixel and more about defining how intelligent systems should behave as interfaces dynamically respond to users, data and context.

For Cisco partners, that means the hardware they deploy is becoming part of a larger intelligent environment designed around one goal: better conversations.

Visit Cisco.com to learn more about Cisco collaboration devices and the Ceiling Speaker Pro.