Characterization Of Speech Privacy In Open Plan Office With Green Building Concept

The reduction on energy consumption of an office for lighting and air-conditioning is possible with the use of an open-plan layout. Therefore, this also supports the ‘Green Building’ concept. The open-office layout provides easiness for communication activities between workers.  However, it has the drawback on a low speech privacy quality. Speech privacy distance is commonly used to indicate the speech privacy quality of a space. Standardized method to measure this index is not yet available. This research attempted to provide a method for speech privacy distance measurement using well-known acoustical parameters, which are reverberation time (T60), Speech Transmission Index (STI) and %Alcons. The case studied for this research is the EECHI office in Jakarta, evaluating nine different sound fields or ‘islands’. The measurement results of the nine ‘island’generated by the Realtime Analyzer software indicated that 11% has good speech privacy based on ISO 3382-3:2012. This also applies for the speech distraction, by means that 11% of the overallmeasurement positions (workstations) are not distracted by conversation in other workstations.