The open office privacy calculator: A value engineering tool for acoustic professionals

Open‐plan spaces consistently challenge architects and acoustic consultants to achieve reasonable speech privacy and low inter‐office distraction. This paper presents a computerized tool to optimize design decisions, maximizing speech privacy while minimizing design effort and implementation cost. Speech privacy can be estimated through real‐time calculation of the Speech Privacy Index (SPI) at a grid of points in a given simulated open office plan. The Open Office Privacy Calculator graphically shows how much workers in that open office would be distracted by any single speaking person and the impact of office environmental parameters on the level of distraction. The tool provides a direct graphical link between design decisions, cost, and acoustic performance for partition height, ceiling height, ceiling type, and the addition of sound masking. Further, this tool introduces the Distraction Index (DI), a measure of how many adjacent office talkers that a given office worker can routinely be distracted by...