In recent time, there has been a rise in the number of coworking and activity-based working spaces. This increase has brought a high return to the real-estate developers but at the same time has compromised with occupant satisfaction. It brings an additional challenge for the architects and designer to look into the user-centred design for workspaces and offices. The current design process relies heavily on the experience. There is a need to evaluate the design from a user’s perspective.
It is known that user’s in an office environment are impacted by various Indoor environmental quality factors. The most important of those factors is the noise disturbance which leads to decreased concentration, reduced satisfaction, and sick building syndrome in some cases. The noise disturbance is caused by speech interactions, appliances and services. These disturbances are relatively unknown to the designer in the early design phase and depend on user behaviour. This graduation project challenges the current design process by proving a digital intervention in the form of workflow. The workflow aims to help architects and designers in the early design process to evaluate spatial layout with respect to disturbances in the office.
This research combines the knowledge of design informatics, psychology and building physics to come up with a simulation workflow. It uses the knowledge of the psychology of workspaces to understand the user behaviour towards the noise disturbance. This knowledge is put to use through an agent-based model simulating the user movement and interactions through the office layout. It is made possible by combining existing methodologies of acoustic simulation, trajectory evaluation with the newly developed agent-based model that is simulating user behaviour. The results are then visualized on the spatial layout to get further insights into the design by testing with two case studies. As a result of prototyping, a simulation workflow is proposed which can be used to evaluate workspace layout in terms of user behaviour towards the noise.