Tuning the office sound masking and the architectonics of office work

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound masking
• noise
• privacy
• open-plan office
• Action Office 2

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I borrow the term “workscape” from Franklin Becker and Fritz Steele’s book (1995) Workplace by design: mapping the high-performance workscape. The authors promote the idea that the design and use of space is key to managing high-performing organisations. I use this term here to reference office planners’ conception of the workplace as a total (and multi-sensory) environment in need to be managed in detail, an idea that traces back at least to the period described here.

2. Propst, The Office, 20; Propst, “The psychology of sensory values,” BEMA Executive symposium, October 27–29, 1969. Robert L. Propst Papers, Acc. 2010.83, Drawer D8, Folder “Psychology of the sensory value-bema”, Benson Ford Research Center, The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI.

3. n.a. Memo, “Action Office 2 Listings April 1973”, Folder AO69, Herman Miller Corporate Archives, Holland, MI.

4. n.a. “Technics: Office acoustics” brochure published by Progressive Architecture, Reprint, September 1979. Pubs 7396, Herman Miller Corporate Archives, Holland, MI.

5. President’s report to HMRC board, 11/4/77, Folder 20 “Hugh dePree.” Herman Miller Corporate Archives, Holland, MI.

6. Memo ‘Financial Advantages of AO”, Folder “AO70”, Herman Miller Corporate Archives, Holland MI.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joeri Bruyninckx

Joeri Bruyninckx is assistant professor in science and technology studies at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences (the Netherlands). He is author of Listening in the Field. Recording and the Science of Birdsong (MIT Press). His current project investigates the interplay of ergonomic science, design, and use in shaping today’s office environments.