Acoustic Meeting Pods prototype mock up.
Two screened acoustic meeting pods have been mocked-up for a current design project. The Local Authority office redesign involves a transformation in ways of working for the customer facing zones. Instead of desks these pods will offer more flow to the space, varying degress of privacy and vision between colleagues and the capability to be easily reconfigured.
The mock-up process is a tester to ensure the dimensions are right. Office furniture design can be a balance between the space planning demands and the need to get meeting pod workstations correctly proportioned. Instead of buying a mock-up only to find it needs alteration, this lightweight mock up is a good interim step to developing the office furniture design. The next step is to build an actual screened acoustic meeting pod using the real materials and finishes and test the acoustic properties. Although this pod will be relatively open it should still have a fair degree of shielding and sound absorbancy.
Using lightweight materials for the mock up allows them to be instantly altered. For the tall pod shown here, the screen height was left at 1800mm and then cut down to 1600mm to test the choice of height.
The open section in this pod will be glazed in the finished pod. The original render of the pod doesn’t convey the feeling of being within the screens in quite the way a physical mock-up does and the trials were much more true to life than a rendered image.