Come on, feel the noise

Come on, feel the noise

Nick Pell, Aukett Swanke Design Director

Nick Pell: 'The issue for us is...students now leaving college are comfortable working in completely different environments to semiretired bankers who are about to go off and spend their millions.'

Phil Hutchinson, BDG: 'For us age has very little to do with it, it's about mindset.' (Take the issue around music - which is on quietly in the background in BDG's new office all the time). 'We've been in this office for six months now, so it's quite new to us. Our old office was a more traditional commercial space, up in Clerkenwell. Here we have more hard surfaces.

Come on, feel the noise

Angela Jeng, John Robertson Architects Associate, and Phil Hutchinson, Director of BDG Architecture + Design

Music provides sound masking across our office. What's more important is you notice when it's not on. Taste in music rarely comes up. Everyone can control it from their iPhone; everyone has playlists. I've never heard an argument about taste, except at Christmas.'

Paige Hodsman: 'What's interesting about this is you've addressed this element by giving people the ability to control it, either by what they play or by getting up and leaving.' (There are quieter zones, if needed). Phil Hutchinson: 'Most people are on laptops. They can just lift it up and walk away.'

Shane Kelly, TP Bennett: 'In one studio I was in people put their headphones on, which I find is almost the worst possible option. You can't get their attention, they can't hear the phone ring.'

Nick Pell: 'We had to set a rule that if you didn't want to be disturbed you could put phones on.

Phil Hutchinson: 'We have fewer people wearing headphones than we did before.... Almost nobody wears headphones now. The music stops that.'

Shane Kelly: 'I prefer the ambient noise of the office. I want to hear the conversation, I like hearing the knowledge sharing of the team.'

Mijial Gutierrez, Pringle Brandon P+W: 'This is the opportunity for design. We can use acoustics to create different environments, for people to go in this space to collaborate, or somewhere else to concentrate. I'm an introvert. Introverts react to information quite differently. We react to noise differently. Too much noise drains our energy. That's why we need a variety of space.

Come on, feel the noise

Giles Martin, Director of Wilkinson Eyre

Paige Hodsman: 'It's about understanding the mix within the office. There's this theory called the arousal theory. Extroverts in their natural state exist at a lower level of arousal. Introverts are the opposite. We (introverts) start at a higher level of arousal. So when it comes to environmental stimulus, noise, even colour, movement, all these external things will affect people differently. Extroverts can take more stimulation to reach that high level of performance, where introverts will peak if they're overstimulated and then crash.

Introverts, when we meet with people ... we give out our energy. Then what happens is we have to go back and recharge. Extroverts get their energy from other people.

 

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