It’s noisy! Shelter from the storm in the workplace

The challenge of providing the optimum level of acoustic performance in an office is one of those issues that everybody accepts is very important. Yet it has proved to be one of those intractable issues that suffers both from some important misperceptions and which also has to be balanced against other challenges when it comes to designing offices, not least the most significant trend of the past twenty or thirty years, namely the shift to open plan working. At the same time we have seen a shrinking of workstation footprints and the greater use of mobile phones and other technology. All of these changes have focused attention on workplace acoustics – currently one of the most talked about issues in the workplace, and visual privacy – one of the least talked about.