Acoustical comfort and speech privacy in the design of flexible open-plan offices

摘要

When an area for a new open-plan office is allocated, the initial architectural design in many cases is subject to unpredictable changes during use by the owner or other involved people. The acoustic design has to have robust characteristics under such circumstances. This means that even under significant changes in the open-plan office, the basic acoustic criteria for a good open-plan office will not be changed, unless a new acoustical design is required. Basic acoustical design principles and new quantitative evaluation formulae for the acoustic design of open-plan offices, first presented by the author in Inter-noise 2012, for the room constant, SNR and the critical radius are applied to match the acoustics to the flexible open-plan office needs. Special attention is paid to the hearing comfort of hearing impaired people. The acoustic design model and method minimize the differences in acoustic comfort due to changed room parameters in such a way that the acoustical quality of the space is sustained as much as possible. The model also defines changes that yield the best results. A short review of the formulation and solved examples that illustrate the acoustic design possibilities conclude the paper.