 |
|
|
|
< Back
 The following is an excerpt from the Herman Miller Research
Summary: It’s a Matter of Balance: New Understandings of Open
Plan Acoustics (©2004).
“Since the introduction of open-plan workspaces over 30 years
ago, individual work areas have become progressively more compact even
as work styles have evolved toward increasing collaboration. As the ASTM
(American Society of Testing and Materials) Subcommittee on Open Plan
Spaces has pointed out, in exchange for the improved communication afforded
by these open-plan offices, organizations have had to face new challenges
in acoustical privacy: “No one likes to sit in an office, trying
to concentrate on critical words or numbers, with a racket coming from
adjacent areas.”
In fact, office workers who participated in a 2002 study on privacy
related issues conducted by Herman Miller cited overheard conversation
as their biggest gripe. Respondents by and large agreed with the statement, “When
I am working in my workspace, I’m distracted by conversations of
my immediate neighbors.” By contrast, fewer people in the study
agreed with the statement, “When I am working in my office, I am
distracted by background noise from machines, printers, etc.”
The more acoustical experts learn about how to minimize the effects
of “adjacent racket” in the open-plan office—in short,
how to achieve good speech privacy—the more confusing it gets for
everyone else, mostly because of all that technical jargon they use: “interzone
attenuation,” “sound transmission class,” “noise
reduction coefficient.” Once that language barrier is surmounted,
however, it’s easy to understand
why controlling the acoustics of the open-plan office is such a challenge.
Rule of Threes
Controlling open-plan acoustics is difficult,
the experts have discovered, because they’re never dealing with
just one thing. As Michael Wodka, a product designer and consultant who’s
been involved in open-plan acoustics since the late 1960s, puts it, “There
isn’t just
one problem, but three; and there isn’t just one tool to use against
those problems, but three (or four, depending on how you count); there
isn’t just one optimal solution, but at least three, involving
combinations of at least three design elements. It takes a systems approach
to sort it all out.”
Sorting it all out requires starting with the problem—or rather
the problems. Regardless of the particulars, the experts have determined
that controlling open-plan acoustics always comes back to controlling
the same three acoustical problems: sound level, speech intelligibility,
and sound paths.”
For the complete text of this research summary, please CONTACT Thomas
Interior Systems at info@thomasinterior.com."
|
|
|
