In the open-plan workspace, which has grown to more than 70% of all offices in the United States, openness and flexibility came at the cost of personal environmental control. Recent evidence has shown a decrease in worker satisfaction due to the lack of privacy and increased noise level and distraction. In this article, we present a vision for using context-aware multimodal augmentation to improve productivity and well-being in the open-plan office. We introduce the mediated atmosphere table (MAT)—a workstation combined with a network of custom environmental control devices (lighting, audio, video, airflow, heating, and scent) to alter the user’s local environment and to improve the restorative quality of the user’s personal space in the open-plan office. A preliminary user study ( N=38N=38 ) examined the effect on stress development based on subjective measures of perception, as well as objective measures extracted from recordings of heart rate variability. Our findings show that MAT significantly ( p<0.05p< 0.05 ) affects occupants’ perception, as well as their physiological response in an open-plan research workspace. Furthermore, we found a significant difference between experimental conditions with and without scent. We provide an exploratory look at the effect of scent and the applications of MAT.

中文翻译：

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介导气氛表 (MAT)：用于压力恢复的自适应多模式媒体系统


在美国，开放式工作空间已占所有办公室的 70% 以上，开放性和灵活性是以个人环境控制为代价的。最近的证据表明，由于缺乏隐私以及噪音水平和注意力分散，员工满意度下降。在本文中，我们提出了使用情境感知多模式增强来提高开放式办公室的生产力和福祉的愿景。我们推出了调节气氛台（MAT）——一个与定制环境控制设备（照明、音频、视频、气流、加热和气味）网络相结合的工作站，可以改变用户的局部环境并提高用户的恢复质量开放式办公室中的个人空间。一项初步用户研究 (N=38N=38) 根据感知的主观测量以及从心率变异性记录中提取的客观测量来检查对压力发展的影响。我们的研究结果表明，MAT 显着 (p<0.05p<0.05) 影响居住者的感知以及他们在开放式研究工作空间中的生理反应。此外，我们发现有气味和无气味的实验条件之间存在显着差异。我们对气味的效果和 MAT 的应用进行了探索性研究。