We are pleased to announce that the final report entitled “Acoustic design of open-plan offices” from the Nordic Innovation Centre about the acoustic conditions in five open-plan offices situated in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland will shortly be published.
This report will soon be available via download at the Nordic Innovation Centre Homepage. We’ll keep you posted!
Sometimes the answer is closer than you think…
When asking people what annoys them at the office you often hear the answer: “My co-worker speaks to loud on the phone” or “My colleagues are so noisy when talking and laughing”. Therefore, it is perhaps not that surprising that this report states that sound propagation, spatial decay and distance of comfort are important factors to take into account in the acoustic design of open plan offices.
The main purpose of the project was to identify room acoustic descriptors suitable for evaluation and design and related to the subjective impression of the acoustic conditions. You can read more about the project here.
The report proposes measurement procedures of the spatial decay parameters DL2 and DLf, which in turn can be converted to a single parameter called distance of comfort.
The results from this study may well have an impact on future acoustic standards, as they have already been taken into account in the french NF S31-199 and also within ISO WG 19 dealing with the third part of ISO 3382 (Acoustics — Measurement of room acoustic parameters — Part 3: Open plan offices).
