ABSTRACT
In general, the degree of acoustic privacy in workplaces is related to occupants’ ability to concentrate without being excessively disturbed by the sound environment and the ability to have private conversations at their workstations. Within the ever-changing landscape of open-plan offices, both activities have consistently been shown to be affected by irrelevant office sounds, especially intelligible speech. This chapter provides the state-of-the-art of acoustic characterisation of open-plan workplaces based on Australian and international perspectives. Focus will be on relevant objective quality metrics, discussion of Australian workplaces, and suggestions for executing acoustic privacy within high-performance workplaces of various designs.
