Council of Rooms Not built. The walk below is a working demo.

Some advice you have to walk to.

Put a different voice in each room. A team walks to it, taps the tag on the door frame, and answers it. By the third room, the building remembers what they said in the first.

The Lobby

Four people live in this building

You have time for three doors before the meeting. Your words stay in this browser and go to an AI model on Cloudflare only to write replies. They aren't saved, but keep real secrets out of it.

What's real here: the characters are made up and the building is imaginary, but the memory works. Dotted underlines mark the sentences an AI writes live from what you said. Everything else is authored, and if the model is out, those sentences use your words in a script instead.

The afternoon, not the app

Those rooms are made-up examples, to show the idea.

How an afternoon would run

This is the design we'd build first, for a leadership team of 8 to 40 at an offsite. None of it has been run with a paying group.

  1. The organizer brings the decision. A one-page brief, or just the question. The cast comes from a template, and they pick who's in which room. Half an hour, with stickers on door frames.
  2. Groups of three to five take one phone. No download. One person taps and everyone else has hands free, so the group faces each other and not a screen. The voice comes out loud.
  3. Each room asks one question. About ten minutes each, on purpose, and each group runs out of time for one door. Which door they skipped goes in the minutes.
  4. Rooms remember and gossip. The Auditor knows what you told the Coroner. That's the point: it's hard to tell one room a nicer story than you told the last.
  5. The long table is the finale. Each group's minutes are read out, in their own words, with the door they skipped. The room hears where groups disagree. The leader takes it from there, with no AI in the chair.

The phone-out problem

A walking event where everyone stares at a phone has failed. So: one phone per group, voice first, short lines, and a screen that goes quiet while people argue. Cooper Hewitt got about 94% of visitors to take its Pen by handing it over at the desk, so a person starts each group at the first door rather than a poster.

Privacy

Nobody gets a transcript of what a colleague said in a room. Memory travels with the group, deleted after the event by default. Everyone is told up front that rooms share what they hear. Confidential material would stay out until we can run it somewhere the client controls.

What happened when others tried

Bristol Museum's four gods

The closest thing we found. In CultureQuest, four Egyptian gods on visitors' phones set tasks around a gallery and remember earlier exchanges. Early results from 40 participants suggest more engagement, especially in groups. It's a funded pilot, so nobody has shown a venue will pay.

Versailles' talking statues

Twenty statues and fountains hold free spoken conversations from a QR code, no install needed. A flagship will put walk-up characters in public. It also means museums already have a vendor, starting from €99 a month, by that vendor's own account.

Brooklyn's app wall

People who used ASK Brooklyn Museum went deep, but use stalled at 1 to 2% of visitors. The museum named reluctance to download as its biggest barrier: 57% thought it would improve a visit and 44% still wouldn't install it. Hence tags, and no app.

Cooper Hewitt's Pen

154,812 Pens in a year collected almost 4 million objects, and 28% of recent visitors looked up their collection afterward. Yet 23.8% collected nothing. People walk and collect if handed the thing, and they care about keeping what comes out of it.

The darkest question comes first

At the Musée d'Orsay's AI Van Gogh, the most popular question was why he killed himself, and it also named a favorite painting his letters don't support. So we use invented characters over real people, and any station needs a plan for what visitors really ask. This demo has one.

Don't oversell the room

Willy's Chocolate Experience charged £35 and handed its actor “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish”. It was cancelled on opening day. And Detour's beautiful audio walks never found enough walkers at $5 a tour. So: sell to the person running the day, and promise only what's standing in the room.

What it can't do

Where would you put these rooms?

That's the real question on this page. The answer might be nothing like an offsite. Tell us the place, who'd walk it, and what each room would say.