A New Collaborative Tool (DOT) with Kari Anderson & Prakash Narasimhalu
The workplace is changing faster than the conversations guiding it. We’re stepping up with a sharper plan for Season Seven: weekly episodes designed to spark action, challenge assumptions, and give you practical tools to build spaces and businesses that actually work.
The messiest part of most furniture projects is not the final spec, it is the beginning. You are juggling 50 to 100 browser tabs, grabbing images from manufacturer sites, pasting details into PowerPoint, and chasing approvals through email threads that nobody can track. That “good enough” workflow creates friction, kills creative flow, and causes decision-making to take longer than it should.
Sid sits down with Kari Anderson and Prakash Narasimhalu to talk about a different approach: a true process innovation for the commercial furniture industry. Kari brings a rare blend of dealer design experience and UX design thinking, while Prakash brings decades of catalog, configuration, and product data expertise through Riverstone Info Tech. Together, they built DOT, a plugin for Miro that brings manufacturer content directly into the collaboration space where many A&D firms and project teams already work.
They get specific about how DOT works: fast search and filters, drag-and-drop products and textiles, and DOT smart cards that carry key data like manufacturer name, product name, pricing and lead time fields, descriptions, and source links.
The trio also explore how Miro’s built-in AI can help turn selected options into a bill of materials, helping teams move from inspiration to a workable budget with far less admin. Along the way, they unpack adoption challenges, why metadata standards matter for better search and AI, and why manufacturers and dealers both benefit when ideation gets easier.
If you want a faster, clearer way to collaborate on workplace design and product discovery, then take a minute to check out DOT.
In this episode:
[00:00] Process Innovation And The Problem
[02:30] Meet The Guests And Their Backgrounds
[05:40] UX Thinking And Where Friction Hides
[10:20] The Collaboration Pain In Ideation
[15:40] Building DOT Fast With Existing Blocks
[18:20] What DOT Does Inside Miro
[26:10] Drag Drop Products With Smart Cards
[31:00] From Ideas To Budgets With BOM
[36:40] Why Manufacturers And Dealers Join
[44:00] Adoption Barriers And How To Try It
[47:40] Where To See DOT In Action
Frequently Asked Questions
What is DOT, and how does it work with Miro?
DOT is a commercial furniture and textile plugin for Miro, a digital whiteboard and collaboration platform. DOT allows designers and project teams to search for industry products and materials, drag them onto a shared Miro board, and access organized product information through Smart Cards. It adds industry-specific content to the collaborative tools already available within Miro.
How can DOT improve collaboration during a furniture project?
DOT gives designers, salespeople, reps, customers, and other project participants a shared visual environment for discussing ideas. Team members can add products, leave comments, compare alternatives, and provide feedback without emailing multiple PDFs and presentations. Because the board remains available online, participants can contribute from different locations and time zones.
What information is included with products added through DOT?
A DOT Smart Card can include the manufacturer and product names, a description, starting price, lead-time information, a link to the manufacturer’s website, and a customizable project tag. If a custom product or material is not available in the library, users can create a manual card using the same structure. The selected cards can also help generate a preliminary bill of materials.
Why should furniture manufacturers and dealers consider using DOT?
Manufacturers can make their products discoverable during the early ideation phase, when designers and customers are actively considering options. Dealers can reduce administrative work, collaborate more effectively with customers and design firms, and move from inspiration toward preliminary budgets faster. DOT also allows dealers to work within Miro, a platform already used by many architecture and design firms.
Resources:
The Trend Report Ep. 162 - Understanding Industry Technology with Kari Anderson
Connect with Kari:
Connect with Prakash:
Connect with Sid:
www.sidmeadows.com
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Sid on YouTube
The Trend Report introduction music is provided by Werq by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4616-werq License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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