In the ISO working group WG 19 a work has been started to produce a new measurement standard as a part three in the ISO 3382 series. To combine the experience from North America concerning cellular office design with the European open-plan office design is a challenge for the ISO working group. The increasing use […]
Offices
Open-plan offices – An intervention study
The increased number of people working in open-plan offices has revealed the lack of knowledge regarding how to design an acoustical environment that’s supporting the activities going on there. Challenges in open-plan office design are to create an environment both for concentration and communication without disturbances between different working groups. In a Nordic Innovation Centre […]
Can open-plan offices really be that bad?
A fierce debate occurred recently, mainly regarding the negative effects of open-plan offices. Open-plan offices make people ill – we could read in media! Stress, colds and decreased productivity are the backsides, Australian researchers say. In 90 percent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative! Can it […]
Acoustics in call centres – still a hot topic in France
Ill. Logica Call Centre, Bridgend, UK A lot has been written about working conditions in call centres and other customer contact centres, but actually very little about acoustics. Apart from the fact that they are noisy and that employees tend to suffer from noise exposure similar to that of industry workers. That is why, the […]
THOUGHTS ABOUT OPEN PLAN SPACES STANDARD 3382-3
This is an interview with PhD Valtteri Hongisto, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and Adjunct Professor at Helsinki University of Technology. He has performed a lot of acoustic research and has been involved in the creation of standards and guidelines, for example the Acoustic Classification of Spaces in buildings SFS […]
ABSORBING TRANSPARENCY – A WINNING THEME
Four architecture students from KTH in Stockholm received the first price at the the Future Workplace contest. Their proposal called “Absorbing Transparency” convinced the jury. High demands on acoustics They choose to create a room structure with high acoustic features to secure that transparency does not lead to an increase of soundlevels. The focus is […]
“New descriptors for open offices are needed – NOW!”
Alternative room acoustic descriptors for open offices – progresses in standardization Pierre Chigot, Saint-Gobain Ecophon SA, France Pierre Chigot, Saint-Gobain Ecophon France Pierre Chigot explained us about the limitations regarding the use of Reverberation Time for acoustical assessment of open-plan offices. Large variance between measurement positions at low frequencies and poor reactivity to changes in […]
More open-plan office acoustics
Have a look at some more summaries on open-plan office acoustics. “Determination of acoustic conditions in open offices and suggestions for acoustic classification” Valtteri Hongisto, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Turku, Finland DL2 and “radius of distraction” as the future acoustic descriptors in open offices? Speech privacy and the distraction efficiency of surrounding speech can […]
“How you improve speech privacy in open-plan offices”
Reported from ICA Madrid John Bradley – National Research Council, Montreal Better speech privacy in open-plan offices can be most consistently achieved by a combination of quantitative design procedures and validation measurements, says John Bradley. This has not usually been done in the past because of the lack of convenient design and measurement tools. While […]
Successful open plan office acoustics sessions at Noise at Work Forum in Lille, France
As previously announced, specific sessions on Open plan office acoustics respectively Call Centre acoustics took place yesterday 4th July at the European Forum on Effective Solutions for Managing Occupational Noise Risks in Lille (France). The sessions gathered approxilately 80 persons and vivid disussions took place after the presentations. The conclusions presented by the chairmen to […]