The technical 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 is now available on the webpage. The report proposes measurement procedures of the spatial decay parameters DL2 and DLf, which in turn can be converted to […]
Offices
Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices
A Danish study by Pejtersen JH, Feveile H, Christensen KB, Burr H claims that sickness absence increases when sharing offices and in open-plan spaces. The analysis was based on a national survey of Danish inhabitants between 18–59 years of age (response rate 62%), and the study population consisted of the 2403 employees that reported working […]
Six ways to get more peace in the office
A survey among 1200 employees shows that six in ten percieve the sounds in the workplace as disturbing. Sounds from the surrounding people, not computers or fans, disturbs the most. Frans Davidsson recently made recommendations based on the results from this study in swedish magazine Chef. Frans Davidsson, Concept Developer – Modern Office, Ecophon Sweden […]
Acoustic design of open-plan offices
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 […]
Finnish Institute of Occupational Health research and guidance in Offices
TOTI is the name of a new project in Finland, coordinated by the Institute of Occupational Health, with the objective to provide holistic guidance in future office design. This unique project combines environmental psychology, acoustics, ventilation, HVAC design and real estate business. For more info and for pdf download click here
Noise in warehouses and open plan solutions
Pierre Chigot made an interview with Nicolas Trompette, who is working at INRS. INRS is a French Institute competent in the area of occupational risk prevention. Nicolas, presented a paper about noise in warehouses and also has a specific interest in sound in open plan solutions. INRS is a French Institute competent in the area […]
Interview with Valtteri Hongisto from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health
Pauli Pallaskorpi caught up with Valtteri, a Senior Research Scientist, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health during the conference at Inter-noise 2010. Click here for more about Valtteri’s work
ISO/DIS 3382-3 Draft for Open plan offices
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 […]
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 […]
