Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, businesses worldwide have operated under the paradigm that concentrating their workforces into a common physical space is a recipe for enhanced collaboration and improved effectiveness as an organization. In the past few decades, these collocated workspaces have evolved into humongous corporate offices filled with critical technology and myriad distractions; in some cases, entire corporate towns like Corning’s home base in upstate New York have emerged.
But while businesses have migrated towards increasingly complex offices, society and personal technology have not stood still. As employees have begun to take their work with them on the go, the needs for large expensive offices has shrunk and companies have responded by shrinking their footprints into more cost effective open office spaces to bring in ambient light and emphasize collaboration. But with this move towards smaller open spaces comes a tradeoff: Packing more and more workers into the same area results in a tremendous loss of personal privacy and increased opportunities for acoustic distractions to come into play.
Our mission from Corning is to address pressing needs like these in offices by leveraging the unique properties of Gorilla Glass. With its nearly impervious scratch resistance, enviably thin form factor, and incredible clarity, Gorilla Glass has rapidly become the world leader in display technology for mobile devices.
Project Learning
Throughout the course of the year, we have investigated myriad uses for Gorilla Glass in the office environment, from transparent collaborative writing surfaces to physical acoustic partitions. After approximately six months of testing it became clear to us that the most innovative and useful opportunity for Gorilla Glass in our chosen Open Offices Lack Acoustic Control environment of open office spaces is as an interactive acoustic partition and masking speaker. While initial attempts to incorporate active noise canceling into our speaker vision proved intractable-a conclusion confirmed through extensive benchmarking research and interviews with audio experts at Sennheiser-we proved that Gorilla Glass could be turned into high quality transparent speakers for localized noise masking. Additionally, conversations with office furniture suppliers Steelcase and Herman Miller confirmed that the durability, thinness, and light weight of Gorilla Glass alone should be enough to attract interest from significant market players.
Simultaneously we conducted research and testing to prove the validity of sound masking in office environments. We conducted both quantitative and qualitative user testing and learned that the use of “colored” noises for sound masking provides significant benefits in improved focus and relaxation in an office setting.
Getting Our Workon*
Finally we decided upon a vision to build interactive glass acoustic partitions that would provide workers in open offices with greater control over their ambient environment. We dubbed our device Workon* due to its goal of bringing focus back to open office work with a delightful interactive audio experience. Workon* incorporates seamless noise masking speakers using an embedded dual Arduino platform and slender aluminum frame situated around an “impossibly thin” 1mm glass panel, all driven by two tiny 13mm transducers. Our final product is 641mm long with a tapered top edge running from 242mm to 352mm above the base of the device. Workon* possesses a striking visual appearance due to its asymmetric geometry and superior craftsmanship. At a mere 7mm thin on its top edge, our interactive partition provides a revolutionarily styling aesthetic to the office furniture market which our contacts at Steelcase are already incredibly excited about.
Workon* is able to function independently of any wired connections, giving it mobile functionality throughout the office similar to a laptop computer. Our audio subsystem utilizes an embedded microcontroller along with a mini SD card and MP3 decoding chip, sending an audio signal out to a high-efficiency audio amplifier which provides up to 2W of streaming sound to each of our two glass mounted transducers.
Since the very beginning we’ve been devoted to maintaining a slick and simple user interface. Therefore we’ve designed a simple capacitive button interface that will allow the user to easily switch between playing masking noise and personal music. In “masking” mode the device presents the user with vibrant LED backlit buttons corresponding to white, brown, or pink noise. In “music” mode it is able to play various music files stored on an internal micro SD card using a simple play, pause, next, and back interface. While in either mode, Workon* will immediately switch over to playing audio from an external source when an audio device is plugged into its 3.5mm line-in jack.
