Abstract
The aim of this study is to develop design guidelines about how to plan offices where workers can concentrate on work or meetings under distracting conversation noise from other workers, without disturbing mutual communication and information sharing. The results of subjective evaluation during the experiments concerning the effects of conversation noise suggest that “steady meaningless masking noise” is effective for improving concentration on work and reducing distraction levels by other persons' speech voice for personal work. “Screening” of noise by means of partitions is effective to improve concentration and the comfort level of the work environment for conversation.
