The sound environment in shared indoor workspaces emerges through the interplay of physical layout, materials, technology, and social dynamics. These spaces are designed with specific purposes in mind, taking acoustics into account during construction. However, the true quality of the sound environment can only be assessed when these spaces are actively used. The perception of a shared indoor sound environment is not fixed or absolute but is influenced by individual perceptions, attitudes, and intentions.

A significant challenge in designing shared indoor workspaces is thus to accommodate the diverse preferences of various users in a common area, a task complicated by the subjective experience of sound. Prior research has primarily focused on reducing unwanted noise through physical installations and assessing their effects, with the emphasis of sound environment management being the implementation of broad, global solutions that aim to cater to the majority. However, there has been minimal initiative toward proactively improving these complex environments while acknowledging the subjective and context-dependent nature of sound environments.

This thesis suggests that the sound environment within a workspace ought to be perceived as a socio-technical system, wherein the design of such environments is a complex and 'wicked' problem. By adopting a design approach that introduces prototypes of an ambient sound environment system into the workspace, this study aims to explore whether various adaptations of the sound xi environment using this technical solution can improve perceived sound quality. The research endeavors to examine the practical use of sound as a design element within workplace settings. The study incorporates laboratory research, field tests in four different offices, and interviews with professionals in indoor environment design.

The thesis presents a design program for shared indoor workplace sound environments, emphasizing the creation of pleasant, unnoticeable sound spaces that offer shielding from office disturbances, known as Space in the Space. It employs a 4E cognitive framework and views both sound, technology, and humans as design materials, aiming to craft a personalized and meaningful sound environment that balances noise reduction with qualitative sound aspects, enabling users to tailor their auditory space and collaborate in the design process. This inquiry explores the complex relationship between auditory comfort, personal preferences, and functionality in shared workspaces. The strong concept of 'Sound Users', is introduced as a view that emphasizes the interactive relationship between users and sound environments. Individuals are not just passive receivers of sound; they are active participants, shaping, modifying, and personalizing their auditory surroundings to suit their needs and activities.

The results suggest that the challenge in designing soundscapes for shared indoor spaces involves striking a careful balance. This entails harmonizing individual and collective needs by creating the possibility of a Space in the Space within a collective auditory environment. This is achieved by adhering to individual preferences through offering personalization features and control to the sound users. When presented with options, users often want to customize them and tend to prefer sounds that not only mask unwanted noise but also provide a sense of comfort and pleasure. Their aim goes beyond simple utility, highlighting a pursuit of meaningful sound environments through sounds that are both functional and pleasant.

Ljudmiljön spelar en stor roll för vår upplevelse, vårt beteende och vår hälsa. I arbetsmiljöer där utrymmen delas, som i öppna kontorslandskap, skapas ljudmiljön genom en kombination av rummets design, materialval, tekniska lösningar och den sociala dynamiken. Dessa utrymmen är designade med tanke på verksamhetens behov och funktioner, där ljudmiljön tas i beaktning under planeringsstadiet. Dock blir den verkliga kvaliteten på ljudmiljön tydlig först när utrymmena tas i bruk. Hur en ljudmiljö uppfattas är personligt och varierar mellan individer, baserat på deras egna tolkningar och attityder till platsen samt deras avsikter i den miljön. Därför är utformningen av ljudmiljöer i gemensamma arbetsytor en utmanande uppgift. Det kräver omsorgsfull hänsyn till och uppfyllande av de olika önskemål och behov som medarbetarna kan ha. Detta arbete blir ännu mer komplext på grund av det subjektiva sättet som ljud upplevs på. Den här avhandlingen föreslår att ljudmiljön på en arbetsplats bör ses som ett sociotekniskt system, där en ömsesidig påverkan mellan den byggda platsen, teknik och människors agerande ger upphov till ljudmiljön. Att designa för den här typen av gemensamma ljudmiljöer utgör därför ett så kallat ”wicked problem”. Wicked problems är komplexa, flertydiga problem utan klara lösningar, där varje försök att hitta en lösning påverkar förståelsen av själva problemet.

Tidigare forskning har i stor utsträckning inriktats mot att minska oönskat buller med fysiska lösningar och att bedöma effektiviteten hos dessa åtgärder. Huvudmålet har varit att implementera omfattande, allmängiltiga lösningar som syftar till att tillgodose behoven hos de flesta. Dock har det gjorts begränsade viiiansträngningar för att proaktivt förbättra dessa komplexa miljöer, där fokus har legat på att förhålla sig till ljudmiljöns subjektiva och situationsspecifika karaktär.

Under tre designcykler har avhandlingen undersökt design och implementering av ljudmiljöprototyper på arbetsplatsen. Dessa prototyper skapar lokala och anpassningsbara ljudmiljöer. Genom att studera hur användare upplever och formar dessa ljudmiljöer, undersöks möjligheterna för att förbättra den upplevda ljudkvaliteten. Avhandlingen har också utforskat vilka egenskaper ljud bör ha för att effektivt kunna integreras som en designfunktion på arbetsplatser. Dessa frågeställningar har utforskats genom laboratorieundersökningar, fälttester i fyra olika kontorsmiljöer och intervjuer med experter inom design av inomhusmiljöer.

Avhandlingen presenterar designprogrammet "Space in the Space", med syftet att skapa behagliga, lokala och anpassningsbara ljudmiljöer. Dessa miljöer är inte avsedda för aktivt lyssnande, utan för att erbjuda skydd mot ljudstörningar. Detta genom att stödja användarna att kunna fokusera sin uppmärksamhet på tilltänkta aktiviteter snarare än på irrelevanta omgivningsljud, utan att fullständigt skärma av användaren från den omgivande ljudmiljön. Programmet bygger på det teoretiska ramverket 4E-kognition och använder ljud, teknologi och människor som designmaterial. Målet är att skapa en anpassningsbar och meningsfull ljudmiljö som balanserar brusreducering med kvalitativa ljudaspekter. Designprogrammet undersöker det invecklade sambandet mellan auditiv komfort, personliga preferenser och funktionalitet i gemensamma arbetsutrymmen. En utkomst av detta är utvecklingen av konceptet "Ljudanvändare", vilket betonar en interaktiv relation mellan användare och deras ljudmiljöer. Människor är inte bara passiva ljudmottagare; de är aktiva gestaltare som anpassar och personifierar sitt ljudlandskap för att möta deras specifika behov och aktiviteter.

Resultaten visar att nyckeln till att designa bättre ljudmiljöer för gemensamma kontorsutrymmen ligger i att noggrant balansera individuella och kollektiva behov. Detta uppnås genom att skapa möjligheter för lokala ljudrum inom det större gemensamma ljudutrymmet, vilka kan anpassas efter individuella preferenser genom att ge användarna möjlighet att modifiera och kontrollera sin ljudmiljö. När användare i studien fick denna möjlighet tenderade de att vilja skräddarsy sin ljudmiljö och föredrog ljud som inte bara dämpade oönskat brus, utan som också bidrog med en känsla av komfort och välbefinnande. Deras ambition gick utöver bara praktisk användning och understryker en strävan efter meningsfulla ljudmiljöer som både är funktionella och behagliga.

The design and noticeability of alert sounds have been widely researched and reported, and not least, notification sounds are ubiquitous in both software and hardware product development. In an ongoing research project concerning the retail industry, we aim at designing short alert sounds that only grab attention from one group of customers, while others do not register the alerts: this particular aspect has to our knowledge not yet been studied. To establish design guidelines for such alert sounds, we conducted an experiment where test subjects would experience ordinary shopping activity including background music and an ambient soundscape in a virtual reality clothing store, but with added alert sounds. We tested, specifically, six differently designed sound alerts belonging to two classes: contextual-specific congruent sounds, and incongruent sounds that did not fit the sonic context. The results disproved our assumptions that incongruent sounds would outperform the congruent and thus in the context more anticipated sounds. The findings suggest that alert sounds can be designed with subtlety and still be noticeable and that customers will not necessarily be annoyed. We present here a first approach towards design guidelines for short alert sounds in a shop environment. Copyright: © 2021 the Authors.

In collaboration with Volvo Cars, we presented a novel design tool to a large public of approximately three million people at the three leading motor shows in 2017 in Geneva, Shanghai and New York. The purpose of the tool was to explore the relevance of interactive audio-visual strategies for supporting the development of sound environments in future silent cars, i.e., a customised sonic identity that would alter the sonic ambience for the driver and by-passers. This new tool should be able to efficiently collect non-experts’ sonic preferences for different given contexts. The design process should allow for a high-level control of complex synthesised sounds. The audience interacted individually using a single-touch selection of colour from five palettes and applying it by pointing to areas in a colour-book painting showing a road scene. Each palette corresponded to a sound, and the colour nuance in the palette corresponded to certain tweaking of the sound. In effect, the user selected and altered each sound, added it to the composition, and finally would hear a mix of layered sounds based on the colouring of the scene. The installation involved large touch screens with high quality headphones. In the study presented here, we examine differences in sound preferences between two audiences and a control group, and evaluate the feasibility of the tool based on the sound designs that emerged. Copyright: © 2019 Kjetil Falkenberg Hansen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Moving towards more open and collaborative workplaces has been an emerging trend in the last decades. This change has led to workers sharing a common open space, with seating’s based on current activity, so called activity-based offices. Consequently, it becomes difficult to design sonic environments that cater to different needs in the same space. In this study we explored the possibility of adding site-specific but location-adaptive sound environments to enhance the experience of an activity-based office workplace. For this purpose, we developed the concept of the “sound bubble,” a micro-space in which the user is embedded by a semi-transparent sound environment. The purpose of the bubble is to help the user ignore irrelevant and disturbing noise while working in an open landscape. The sound bubble supports the user to stay in “everyday listening” mode, i.e., not focusing on anything particular in the surrounding environment while being able to keep a link with it. The sound bubble was evaluated by a total of 43 test subjects participating in an experience-based test, conducting their usual work tasks in an office landscape. Our results show that the sound bubble can enhance auditory work conditions for individual work requiring concentration.

In the context of extended reality, the term immersion is commonly used as a property denoting to which extent a technology can deliver an illusion of reality while occluding the users’ sensory access to the physical environment. In this paper we discuss an alternative interpretation of immersion, used in the My Sound Space project. The project is a research endeavor aiming to develop a sound environment system that enables a personalized sound space suitable for individual work places. The medium, which in our case is sound, is transparent and thus becomes an entangled part of the surrounding environment. This type of immersion is only partly occluding the users sensory access to physical reality. The purpose of using the sound space is not to become immersed by the sounds, rather to use the sounds to direct cognitive attention to get immersed in another cognitive activity. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

The design of sonic environments is in need of more active strategies, taking into account not only the physical but also the social and sensorial aspects of a place. This implies abandoning traditional, mono-disciplinary responses in favour of interdisciplinary methods and approaches. In this study we explored the possibility of inserting context-sensitive sound textures to improve the experience of an activity-based office workplace. For this purpose, we developed the concept of the ’sound bubble’ - a micro-space in which the user is embedded by a semi-transparent added sound environment that will operate as a subtle sound mask, attracting the attention without needing to hide the disturbing environment. This should help users (the workers) to stay in an ’everyday listening’ mode. This means, not focusing on the environment in particular but on their tasks, while preserving the link with the surrounding space and activities. 

A growing number of organizations are moving towards more open and collaborative workplaces. In these offices workers share a common open space, often with flexible seating based on activities, so called activity-based offices. Most problems in these workplaces are related to sound. Thus, the question of how to design suitable acoustic environments, supporting both collaborative and individual work, has emerged. Noise-reduction approaches do not suffice. In this study we explored the possibility of adding context-sensitive, activity-based sound environments to enhance the office workplace. For this purpose, we developed the “sound bubble,” a prototype for individual work, sonically immersing the listener and generating a sensation of an encapsulating sonic environment. A total of 43 test subjects participated in an experience-based test using the sound bubble prototype while conducting self-selected, ordinary work tasks in their office landscape. Their behaviors during the test were observed and documented. All participants took a post-experience questionnaire about experiences working in the sound bubble, and two subjects were interviewed. The responses show that the sound bubble can enhance auditory work conditions for individual work that demands concentration.

Being the first university in the world to provide doctoral program in Work-integrated Learning (WIL), we face the challenge of how to integrate doctoral courses into the WIL philosophy, which is the profile of the University West, Sweden. To exemplify what we mean by such a notion of integration, we introduce and demonstrate our proposed ontological approach to integrate a PhDcourse into the fundamental concepts underpinning WIL. The WIL within the context of informatics research (which is a subfield of the IS discipline) playsfive different roles of (1) the main course content, (2) the target occupation ofthe students and occupational field of the teachers, (3) the analytical perspective of the research activities in the course, (4) the educational method where teachers and students conduct collaborative research activities as a cognitive apprenticeship learning model, and (5) a co-authored research paper as outcome.The outcomes of such a conducted approach and lessons learned from the course will be thoroughly described. In the course, a meta-analysis of WIL informatics research will be performed to examine four dimensions which are: theories relevant for WIL; methods used in WIL research; occupational fields in WIL informatics studies; and roles of technology in WIL research. The course is arranged in the these phases: Local investigation; locally rooted research within the informatics field is examined by the course participants in dialogue with the authors of a number of published articles in order to see the extent and the how aspects of these identified WIL-oriented research work; Local synthesis; both teachers and the PhD students (i.e., course participants) explore the results and synthesize a local WIL-model; Global overview; a number of related international literature is selected and studied; Global synthesis; The local WIL model is compared to the global investigation. Co-authoring; a research paper is co-authored by the course participants and presented at a conference. By doing so, we enhance our understandings and thus contribute to one additional practical application of WIL's pedagogical philosophy, which influences the course content, the course format, the activities, the teaching-learning model,and the outcome of the course.

This paper addresses the problem of sound disturbance in open office environments. We have in a design-based research study explored how digital, real time generated sound can be added to a work environment and how these sound environments are perceived by respondents when performing work tasks. In this first explorative study we have chosen to focus on designing a digital sound system for activity-based offices, where the physical environment is already designed for particular activities. Our approach is to explore if adding appropriate acoustic designs to the ambient environment can enhance workplaces. Our results show that test subjects perceived that acoustic design could enhance the ambient environments if the acoustic design is pertinent with the environment as a whole.

This paper address the problem of sound disturbance in open office environments. We have in a design-based research study explored how digital, real time generated sound can be added to a work environment and how these sound environments are perceived by respondents when performing work tasks. Being such a complex situation, we have in this first explorative study chosen to focus on designing a digital sound system for activity-based offices, where the physical environment is already designed for particular activities. Our approach is to explore if workplaces can be enhanced by adding appropriate acoustic designs to the ambient environment. Our results show that test subjects perceived that acoustic design could enhance the ambient environments if the acoustic design is pertinent with the environment as a whole.