insulate or interact
zip it!
Project in collaboration with HAY
SupervisorStefan Diez, the Diez Office
Claus-Christian Eckhardt, Professor at Lund University
Anna Persson, Lecturer at Lund University
April 2016 / Lund, Sweden
A workplace always manages to have distracting noise or annoying colleagues when you need to concentrate on work. Zip It!, a sound insulation chair, allows discretion with your privacy by changing the sound in your environment. Insulate your workspace and politely tell your office to zip it without raising your voice. When it’s time to discuss or make some noise yourself, unzip and interact.
Open offices stress out workers, distract their attention, and remove their privacy.
We are surrounded by sound all the time. Some are pleasant and soothing; others are annoying and distracting. Sound affects the way we feel and behave. In the working environment, sound is particularly critical. Complaints in the office often involve the lack of speech privacy, high noise levels, and the distraction of, overheard extraneous conversations. Especially when people start removing walls in offices to build an open-plan workplace.
Noise is a serious problem in the open-plan office because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory, is the most disturbing type of sound.
New York Times
From Cubicles; Cry for quiet pierces office buzz
John Tierney
Up to 82% of people find overhearing conversations annoying. Especially, overhear one side of a conversation, are so infuriatingly unpredictable that our brains can’t focus on much else.
University of San Diego
Veronica Galván
Cognitive Psychologist
A moderate level of noise — the equivalent of the background buzz of conversation — prompts more creative thought.
Oxford University
Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of
Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition
Ravi Mehta, Juliet Zhu, Amar Cheema
Silence is not golden: most people prefer some level of background noise and activity to mask their own voices as well as to provide them with a sense of what is going around them.
Workspace Strategies: Environment as a Tool for Work
Jacqueline C. Vischer
There's a sweet spot between silence and din. Small doses of distraction - including hard-to-read fonts - prompt the mind to work at a more abstract level, which is also a more creative level. It turns out that a moderate noise level is the sweet spot for creativity.
The Wall Street Journal
A Creative Buzz
Christopher Shea
Over 70% of office workers say that a reduction in noise would increase their productivity.
A Sound Business Plan: Designing Better Acoustics
for Today’s Open Offices
Renee Young
We don’t have any earlids and unless you put headphones on, otherwise it’s directly understood in the brain which is programmed to decode conversation.
A room within a room is a method of isolating sound and preventing it from transmitting. And this is an experiment I did to my understanding of "a room within a room". I sat in this cardboard installation I made myself for three weeks to try out. Even though it didn't completely insulate the noise from our studio but slightly. However, I found myself can concentrate more than before. I guess because it gave me some privacy and security.
Make Acoustic Environment and Privacy Optional
Wall or Table
Insulation or Interaction
I believe that there definitely are advantages of working in an open-plan office, however, when I really need to think, I have to be in a quiet and private space. Only then, I can actually concentrate and create.
Office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing. Therefore, I started to move back some “walls” that can help with changing the acoustic environment and privacy but in a more flexible way that you can easily remove them when you don’t need them. Also, I want it to be the minimal way to build walls - adding them on chairs.
Textile and zipper are the way I felt they could be interesting and super easy to operate just like a tent that is easy to insulate yourself or open up. Felt is a good sound-absorbing material that I found also suitable in an office. And I also added glass wool to help absorb and give a more soft touch, since it would be a small closed space if you zip it up. Huge zippers are more playful and really speak up for someone who’s sitting in there. I wanted it to be fun and playful, not just an ordinary workplace.
Exhibited at
Milano Design Week Ventura Lambrate, 2016 April
DMY Berlin Kraftwerk Berlin, 2016 June
