Tuning the office sound masking and the architectonics of office work

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the emergence and development of a new soundscape of work in the open-plan office. To understand the persistent tension between public social interaction and private undisturbed work in many open-offices today, I argue that we need to account for the perceptual engineering that has been built into its very concept. To do so, I reconstruct the development and reception of Action Office 2, a pioneering and influential open-plan office concept that was launched by manufacturer Herman Miller Inc. in the late 1960s. I show how its designers sought to optimise the office as an informatic system by balancing workers’ experience of exposure and enclosure in the open-plan office. This informatic challenge coincided with a new approach to office acoustics in the 1960s and 1970s that focused on managing intelligibility and improving privacy rather than noise. Examining this “perceptual technic” reveals how noise became an architectonic element that served to optimise and economise a relation between private and public experience of work. Ultimately, I argue, this technic and the sound masking technologies that derive from it have helped sustain both the open-plan office to the present day, but also the tensions underlying it.