Simulation of Several Open Plan Office Design to Improve Speech Privacy Condition without Additional Acoustic Treatment

Abstract

As a result of having low partitions between workstations, most of the open plan offices have poor speech privacy conditions. Utilization of high-cost acoustic treatment usually is necessary to improve this condition. In order to increase the speech privacy without increasing the installation cost, the acoustical condition can be optimized by re-arranging the office layout through computer simulation. Referring to the guidelines of measurement set-up and calculation as derived in ISO 3328-3:2012, ray tracing simulation has been conducted to find this optimum condition. Results on this paper show that the acoustical condition can be improved through layout, workstation, or screen partition modification.