The experience-driven office has been the dominant design idea of the past several years. Owners competing for tenants and companies competing for attendance have invested in better light, better air, better food, better furniture, and better views. The logic holds that people will choose to come in if the building gives them something home cannot.

Acoustics has been the slowest of those elements to get attention despite consistently ranking as the thing people complain about most. Oxford Economics research found noise distraction to be the top complaint among open plan workers, and more than half of non-executive employees report that ambient noise reduces their satisfaction and productivity. A building can get everything else right and still leave people unable to concentrate.

Designing for sound is complicated by the fact that people want different things from it, and the same person wants different things depending on the task. Rather than designing to an average, Ben Sachwald, AKRF’s Senior Vice President and Director of Acoustics, Noise, and Vibration, argues for building range into the floor plate. “It is better to cluster your noisier spaces together and then provide a gradient as you go further away,” he said. “This gives people options. The approach that we take is to remember that no two brains are identical and different tasks and moods can call for different situations.”

How designers treat the sound within those zones has also changed. The standard tool for decades was sound masking, usually filtered white or pink noise played through ceiling speakers to raise the background level enough that nearby conversation becomes unintelligible. It reduces speech distraction effectively and most people dislike how it feels.

Natural sound has emerged as the alternative, and Sachwald sees it as part of a broader misunderstanding about what biophilic design involves. “Some people still think biophilic design just means more plants in the space,” he said. “That is an element but it is much bigger than that.”

Biophilic soundscaping is the term for the practice, and the research behind it goes back further than the current interest. A 2015 study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America found that natural sound masking in open-plan offices outperformed silence, with cognitive functioning holding higher across the workday. More recent research conducted in a London workplace by Kinda Studios with researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London found participants scoring 12 percent higher on creative thinking under a natural soundscape than under typical office sound, completing cognitive tasks faster without losing accuracy.

Which sound belongs in which space depends on what the space is for, and the choice is more deliberate than picking something pleasant. “In some areas you do want masking so you can use something more like a babbling brook,” Sachwald said. “To bring in energy, you might want waves crashing or birds chirping or have soft, peaceful music playing.” Water sounds are steady and predictable, which is why they cover speech well in focus areas. Birdsong and wave patterns vary enough to pull attention, which makes them better suited to a lobby than a quiet floor.

Architectural renderings have given clients a way to see a space before it exists, and sound has had no equivalent. AKRF built one, a facility in Midtown Manhattan called PinDrop that functions as a floating room within a room, acoustically isolated with an extremely low baseline sound level and a neutral response. The room runs a 10.1 channel Genelec playback system and carries five different acoustical treatments across its walls and ceiling. A client sits in it and hears an auralization, a calibrated rendering of what their conference room will sound like, what the open floor will sound like at capacity, what a particular ceiling treatment changes about either. The project has been covered by the New York Times, the Associated Press, and Fast Company, and won an ACEC New York Engineering Excellence Gold Award.

Being able to demonstrate acoustic outcomes has pulled sound earlier into the design conversation and kept it there through construction, which is where many acoustic decisions quietly get reversed. Value engineering substitutions happen late, often without anyone evaluating the acoustic consequence. Sachwald says being able to let clients hear the difference changes those conversations. “Maybe the contractors are proposing a different product, now we can get the clients to come in and hear how that would change the acoustics,” he said.

That shift is already changing how office designers works with clients, bringing acoustic questions into early planning rather than leaving them to be solved after someone complains. Sachwald expects more of the design process to run through the room as owners get used to evaluating sound the way they evaluate everything else about a space.

The post What Designers Are Finally Getting Right About Office Noise appeared first on Propmodo.

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