In recent years, the value of neurodivergent employees has started to be properly recognized. But we have a long way to go in designing equitable workplaces that nurture different people day-to-day.
Inclusive design sometimes involves practical physical interventions, like wheelchair ramps. But for neurodivergent people, the barriers may not even be visible. Many people face sensory obstacles in the built environment.
“Many people face sensory obstacles in the built environment.”
For neurodivergent children, adverse responses to noise frequently stop them being able to take part in range of activities. These barriers persists into adulthood and the built environment.
“Neurodiversity” encompasses the range of cognitive and behavioural traits that naturally exist in humans, such as autism, ADHD, Tourettes syndrome and dyslexia. Approximately 15-20% of the popular are thought to be neurodivergent.
When you think about sound and neurodiversity, the image that comes to mind might be a child covering their ears when they hear a loud noise like a vacuum cleaner. This is one type of response, but it’s not the only scenario.
Atypical responses to sound are most commonly associated with autism, but even within autism responses to sound vary hugely. As Dr Stephen Shore famously said, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”
People with other conditions, like ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome and dyslexia, can also process and respond to sound differently too.
Within autism, 50 to 70% of people experience some kind of “decreased sound tolerance” and the majority of children with autism face daily challenges with this.
This “hypersensitivity” doesn’t just relate to how loud a sound is. The ways in which neurodiverse people might have a decreased tolerance of sound include:
On the other hand, neurodivergent people can also be hyposensitive to sound. For some people, complex, loud or stimulating environments are enjoyable and help them perform better.
Hyposensitivity is particularly prominent in people with ADHD. Research shows, for example, that listening to complex music like rock, rap and classical can improve children’s task performance, reduce their ADHD symptoms and generally alleviate boredom. For neurotypical children this level of stimulation worsened their performance instead.
These concepts of hypo- and hyper-sensitivity can also be applied to the wider population: Introverts typically prefer quieter, less stimulating environments while extroverts tend to enjoy loudness and higher stimulation.
For decades, noise has been one of the biggest complaints in offices. Some workplaces are too loud, which is stressful and bad for health. Others ––particularly post lockdown––are unnaturally quiet. In these spaces, distracting sounds become even more apparent and stop people collaborating due to lack of privacy.
These issues are particularly problematic for the neurodivergent population.
There’s good reason to improve everybody’s sonic experiences. Sound affects physical health, mental health and performance at work. But these longstanding issues with workplace noise tend to disproportionately affect neurodivergent people.
“Issues with workplace noise tend to disproportionately affect neurodivergent people.”
Historical approaches to workplace noise have tended to focus solely at reducing noise levels. But, instead of just removing negative noise, there can be real benefits in bringing sound into the workplace. Soundscaping is the act of introducing carefully designed sound into an indoor space for positive effect.
So how can we implement office soundscaping that works for such an amazingly diverse group of people? Our design guide, Soundscaping for Neurodiversity, suggests five best practises, based on research and our experience soundscaping offices around the world.
