Flipping productive meetings
Samsung’s Flip turns the idea of a traditional meeting room whiteboard or flip chart on its side.
Flip is a 55-inch interactive digital flip chart that can turn from landscape to portrait orientation in seconds. It is designed to replace paper flip charts where people write on large sheets of paper, but it goes further.
As you might expect, people can write or draw on Flip as you can on paper flip charts. Because it is digital you can also import photos, charts, text or other digital documents. You can resize or crop these images before adding annotations. In, say, a meeting to redesign a product’s packaging marketing team members can mark suggested changes for designers to work on.
Flip presentations can be stored for later use or electronically distributed.
In some ways this is similar to electronic whiteboards that have been around for a couple of decades now, but there are a number of important twists. The rotating screen means Flip can be used for presentations as well as capturing meeting ideas or other information.
But the most important difference between Flip and a conventional electronic whiteboard is that Samsung designed it to be simple enough for anyone to use immediately.
Samsung digital signage product manager Lane Stephens says there’s no need for training. He says: “It’s all about simplicity. We noticed people would go into meeting rooms where there is a conventional digital whiteboard, but they did not even switch it on. Although the devices are useful and powerful, they are not easy for everyone to use.
“The traditional electronic whiteboard is a challenge for collaborative engagement. Flip is a lot less complex. You just hit the screen and it is on immediately. People can write on the screen using a pen, stylus or anything hard and wipe things off using their hands.”
He says that Flip is much better than other tools for capturing what happens in a meeting. It has simple menus with a handful of obvious icons that allow people to save meeting notes as PDFs. These can be mailed to people, sent to phones, stored on a USB drive or a network server. The documents can also be printed.
“Samsung developed Flip after extensive research look at what people were doing with traditional whiteboards and flip charts. We found they wanted to annotate content. So, a team of architects and builders might import multiple building plans to work on. They can then make notes about changes to items and distributed those changes to everyone involved. The plans can go back and forth as things change.”
The researchers also found that modern work meetings are often more collaborative affairs than they were in the past. A group of people might come together to bring each other up-to-date, generate ideas and collectively solve problems. Often, they involve people who might not otherwise spend much time with each other.
Stephens says one example of where Flip is being used today is in Agile workplaces where people have daily 15-minute stand-up meetings. He says a recent change to Flip’s software means there is now a template for digital versions of the Post-It notes that have become a mainstay in some Agile organisations.
He says: “During the meeting they can expand and highlight a single Post-It, focus on it, then collapse it back down. Later everyone can read it on their own device.”