Speech Intelligibility and Confidentiality in Open Premises

This article presents the results of an acoustic study in open premises in banks, where the main problem is to guarantee the confidentiality of the conversations between the customers and the bank advisor. The open architectural concept considered here is a generalisation the “Garden office”: although it does give concrete expression to the desire for openness and availability to the public, it poses new difficulties on an acoustic level. How can we in fact avoid the conversations being heard in an area that has neither doors nor complete partitions and for which the main characteristic is precisely to have as few partitions as possible? Based on measurements carried out in premises of this type, we have been able to establish the quantities that best characterise the situation. We observed that the intelligibility still remained good despite the attenuation brought about by the addition of screens, which obviously meant that the confidentiality could not be guaranteed. Once this was established, a certain amount of acoustic layouts were defined – which should already be defined during the pilot phase - that were able to reconcile the need for openness to the public with the confidentiality of the conversations.