Optimizing privacy in open-plan offices

Abstract

The open-plan office is a mainstay for collaborative industries (architecture, technology) and is now very trendy among non-collaborative industries. While owners and boards favor their environmentally-conscious and social factors, employees and patrons are reported to feel a compromise of their audio and visual privacy. For groups such as women, the consistent compromise of their privacy becomes an equity issue as the open-plan office is prevalent in historically woman-dominated professions (such as nursing and teaching) and continues to follow them into industries that may not need the open-plan office to function. All the while, the open-plan office has been studied to be not favored by any gender at any scale. Those scales include open-plan offices built for groups as small as 5 to as big as 30. This research hopes to collect data via surveys from employees and patrons of a non-collaborative industry that do business and operate within an open-plan office. Additionally, using laws of sound diffusion and convex surfaces to design office furniture that mitigates sound levels and speech intelligibility will decrease the irrelevant speech effect (ISE). This design will be tested against a traditional, perpendicular control using acoustic room simulation software and an analysis of sound pressure levels and sound reverberation, and diffusion of both designs will be compared.