Crossed effects of audio-visual environment on indoor soundscape perception for pleasant open-plan office environments

Abstract

An open-plan office (OPO) layout promotes communication and teamwork among workers and provides flexibility in working; however, it also adversely affects work satisfaction, health, and worker privacy, leading to dissatisfaction and poor task performance. In this study, the subjective responses in an audio-visual OPO environment were analyzed to investigate the effects of the environment on indoor soundscape perception for designing pleasant OPOs. The outdoor environments of four OPOs with four different visual layouts were divided based on two conditions with different window views (good and bad views) to model eight visual stimuli. The auditory aspect was evaluated by computer simulation using three sound sources. For subjective assessment, virtual reality technology was employed with 24 audio-visual stimuli, and thirty-four subjects were asked to rate the perceived affective quality and overall quality. Task performance was quantified using auditory digit span tasks. The spatial preference decreased with the Loud, Variable, and Reverberant attributes and increased with the Bright, Orderly, and Wide attributes. For the same OPO soundscape, the window area ratio and floor area showed positive correlations with visual privacy, visual satisfaction, speech privacy, and sound satisfaction. However, work satisfaction and task performance exhibited contradictory relationships with the visual parameters. Furthermore, wide, open workspaces yielded high work satisfaction, whereas narrow, confined work spaces yielded high task performance. These results indicate that the relationship between work satisfaction and task performance must be considered for a balanced OPO design, providing practical guidance for designing pleasant OPO environments.