Abstract
Japanese companies have been focusing on enhancing the knowledge creative activities of older office workers in recent years. In addition, the way of working in the office has been shifting from traditional divisional routine work to collaborative or creative work, and office spaces are becoming quieter, with an increasing number of extremely quiet spaces (noise level < 40 dB). A sound environment that is too quiet gives workers the impression that it is difficult to converse with others, because they are worried about what people around them may think. The appearance of the knowledge creative society in recent years has led to a desire for changes in the workplace environment to improve the productivity of intellectual activities. To realize a sound environment that encourages knowledge creative activities, study outcomes need to be accumulated. Therefore, to clarify what kind of sound environment would be appropriate for knowledge creative activities by multiple people, we conducted psychoacoustic experiments to examine the effects of sound pressure level (signal-to-noise ratio), type of sound, and reverberation time in conference rooms on the impression of a “good conversation”. In addition, we considered a causal model for the psychological evaluation of a “good conversation” by conducting a multiple regression analysis of psychological evaluations of the experimental participants. The results indicated that a sound environment considered too quiet for multiple people to have discussions about knowledge creative activities lowers the impression of a “good conversation”, whereas high levels of relaxation lead to the impression of a “good conversation”.
Highlights
With the development of computer technology and financial engineering and the spread of the Internet, industry has shifted from manufacturing to information and technology, telecommunications, and services
According to the results of analysis of variance based on the difference in attributes between students and office workers, no statistically significant difference was shown in their evaluations
To investigate the influence of the sound stimuli, SNR, and reverberation time on the psychological evaluation items used in our experiment, a three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted using JMP ver. 14.2 (SAS Institute Inc., Tokyo, Japan)
Summary
With the development of computer technology and financial engineering and the spread of the Internet, industry has shifted from manufacturing to information and technology, telecommunications, and services. The transformation from an industrial to a knowledge based society is currently underway [1], which means that intellectual productivity in the office is a major factor influencing economic competition. Changes in the workplace environment to improve the productivity of intellectual activities are needed because of the recent appearance of the knowledge creative society. As Japanese companies are increasingly focusing on promoting the knowledge creative activities of office workers, the mode of working in the office is shifting from traditional divisional routine work to creative and collaborative work [2]. Creative work performed in the office involves knowledge creative activities carried out both independently and by multiple people, such as meetings for proposing ideas. Knowledge creative activities have traditionally been divided into convergent and divergent thinking [3].
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