Tag: cubicles

Impact Lab > cubicles
Engineering, Environment, Inventions, Science & Technology News

Scientists have discovered a shape that blocks all sound–even your co-workers

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Offices and tiny apartments could be transformed by the work of Boston University researchers, who recently unveiled an “acoustic metamaterial” that blocks all sound.

 A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. They cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Nothing.

How was this possible? Did they block the other end of the pipe with noise canceling foams or a chunk of concrete? No, nothing of the sort. The pipe was actually left open save for a small, 3D-printed ring placed around the rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear.

Continue reading… “Scientists have discovered a shape that blocks all sound–even your co-workers”

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Business, Human Behavior, Latest Trend

Companies are buying these portable soundproof rooms like crazy to fix the worst thing about their open floor offices

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Room is a new company that’s created private, semi-soundproof phone booths for noisy, crowded offices.

Already, the company has snagged high profile clients like NASA, Salesforce, and Nike.

Room says they’re on track to sell $10 million worth of product in their first year of business.

If you work in an open office, it’s likely that you’ve ducked into a hallway, a closet, or even the bathroom to get a few moments of quiet to make a phone call.

With the move to the open office and the collective banishment of cubicles, finding a quiet, private place can sometimes be close to impossible.

Continue reading… “Companies are buying these portable soundproof rooms like crazy to fix the worst thing about their open floor offices”

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Analysis, Business, Science & Technology News

Cubicles are the worst: Study

Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable.

Is your work station an invading overlord? Do your belongings march across the long desk you share with other workers, spilling out of your space and encroaching on the neutral zones abutting your colleagues’ work areas? Don’t worry, thanks to recent research by Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear at the University of Sydney, that mess probably doesn’t bother your coworkers all that much. In fact, of all the myriad annoyances of office life, workspace cleanliness bothered scarcely 10% of workers — although workers in offices where there are no partitions, coworkers were bothered slightly more.

 

 

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Animals, Art, Photo Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Phone Booth Turned Into Aquarium In The Cellphone Era

Phone Booth Turned Into Aquarium In The Cellphone Era 

 Phone booth aquarium

As phone booths continue down their inexorable path to extinction, artists think of other, more aesthetically pleasing ways to use the endangered glass cubicles. “Why not just install a soothing, blood-pressure-lowering aquarium inside that ugly old phone booth,” French artists Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino might have said. And that’s just what they did, installing their art piece smack dab in the middle of the Lyon Festival of Lights.

Continue reading… “Phone Booth Turned Into Aquarium In The Cellphone Era”

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