Subjective evaluation of outdoor environments for sedentary office activities -Trial experiment on two terrace locations -

Abstract

Today, with various work styles increasing, the outdoor as a workspace is being reconsidered. Some may feel more tolerant of outdoor noise than of indoor one, but there is limited research that mentions how background noise affects humans psychologically in outdoor work environments. Based on the hypothesis that the outdoor tolerance of noise level is higher than the indoor one, we conducted subjective experiments on external terrace locations. In conducting these experiments, we only avoided rainy days and choose two different locations; Location A was a location with a good view, and Location B was a location surrounded by trees, but controlled no other environmental factor. The sound environments in both locations were evaluated as highly "Quiet" and "Easy to have a conversation" even though the noise level was over 60 dB, which is higher than in an ordinary office. Additionally, Location B with a noise level of 71-74 dB was evaluated better in some terms, such as "Motivating" and "Easy to focus on the work", than Location A with a noise level of 61-64 dB. In future work, we plan to conduct experiments to reveal the effect on subjective evaluation by some factors of "prospect-refuge" by Jay Appleton.