Magda Szubert

I believe that our environment has a giant and yet still undervalued impact on our health and behavior.

I have a dream that people who create indoor environments of dwellings, schools and offices – places where we spent most of our time - have in mind that they design these buildings also for people. I wish they would create them as if they were to be occupied by themselves.

When I enter a room, I am bombarded by many stimuluses. I can see how space is arranged, I can feel the premise and hear it. All these factors have an impact on how I perceive the interior and if I function well there or not. The way we perceive the room and if we are productive there is also affected by individual personalities and what kind of task we do. These factors should be taken into consideration during the design process of buildings and its interiors, also office premises.

If I have everyday tasks to do, I like the smooth and rather quiet buzz of a well-designed open plan office, where I can ask my colleagues sitting near to me a question. Other people are not distracted, since our conversation level is reduced over distance, they cannot hear any meaningful content. When I have difficult and complex tasks to do, I need silence and I choose a separate room, without external sounds coming in. I also prefer to have planned meetings also in separate rooms, with natural feeling acoustics, where sounds don’t reflect back to me on hard ceilings or wall surfaces. I avoid hard aquarium-like rooms, even if access to natural light is important to me. What is also important to me is spontaneous communication and knowledge sharing, but without distracting others. For longer, unplanned discussions I choose other multi-purpose areas, that are also remote from the workstations.

What kind of offices do you like, what are the conditions that you prefer?

We know many research studies which have informed us how sound affects employees. Based on our experience from many Polish and international projects we know how to provide optimal acoustic environments for different tasks in different organizations.

Let’s talk about office acoustics, we are eager to share our knowledge and experience to support more effective work spaces.