Arranging office space into a single open room offers advantages in terms of easy exchange of information and interaction among coworkers, but reduces privacy and acoustic comfort. Thus, the purpose of this work was to evaluate the acoustic quality of a real open-plan office and to propose changes in the room to improve the acoustic conditioning of this office. The computational model of the office under study was calibrated based on RT and STI measurements. Predictions were made of the RT and STI, which generated the radius of distraction r(D), and the rate of spatial decay of sound pressure levels per distance doubling DL(2) in the real conditions of the office and after modifications of the room. The insertion of dividers between work stations and an increase in the ceiling's sound absorption improved the acoustic conditions in the office under study.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2012.03.007 | DOI Listing |
ACS EST Air
January 2025
Lyles School of Civil & Construction Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, United States.
Commercial HVAC systems intended to mitigate indoor air pollution are operated based on standards that exclude aerosols with smaller diameters, such as ultrafine particles (UFPs, D ≤ 100 nm), which dominate a large proportion of indoor and outdoor number-based particle size distributions. UFPs generated from occupant activities or infiltrating from the outdoors can be recirculated and accumulate indoors when they are not successfully filtered by an air handling unit. Monitoring UFPs in real occupied environments is vital to understanding these source and mitigation dynamics, but capturing their rapid transience across multiple locations can be challenging due to high-cost instrumentation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
December 2024
Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Alberto Aguilera, 23, 28015, Madrid, Spain.
Biophilic workplace design has been proposed as an effective strategy to increase employee well-being in open-plan offices. To expand our understanding of why and for whom indoor nature exposure increases well-being, the aim of this study was to evaluate vigor as a mediator and to examine whether nature relatedness is a direct antecedent of nature exposure or a moderator of the relationship between exposure to nature and vigor. Based on longitudinal data obtained from a two-wave panel design with white-collar workers in open-plan offices (Study 1, n = 345; Study 2, n = 291), using a rival model strategy and two dependent variables, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Acoust Soc Am
November 2024
College of Computing, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
The soundscape approach has been utilised in recent research for residential environments, but applications to indoor working environments remain limited. This study investigated the suitability of affective quality evaluations of open-plan office acoustics. Perceptual assessments were completed by occupants of eight open-plan office floorplates, using affective dimensions outlined in PD ISO/TS 12913-3:2019 and indoor soundscape studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeliyon
September 2024
Department of Architectural Engineering, Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, Chungbuk, 28644, Republic of Korea.
Cogn Res Princ Implic
June 2024
Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Multilingual speakers can find speech recognition in everyday environments like restaurants and open-plan offices particularly challenging. In a world where speaking multiple languages is increasingly common, effective clinical and educational interventions will require a better understanding of how factors like multilingual contexts and listeners' language proficiency interact with adverse listening environments. For example, word and phrase recognition is facilitated when competing voices speak different languages.
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