INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP PRIVACY NEEDS ACROSS JOB TYPES: PHASE 1 STUDY

摘要

This case study examined privacy needs across four job types at a large Midwestern manufacturing company. The study determined that business and technical professionals, managers, and administrative support services personnel shared similar privacy needs and meanings, many of which they associated with the physical environment for performing work. The study further determined that job types consistently identified certain design features as affecting these privacy needs. The features perceived as affecting privacy for individual work, however, were not always the same features perceived as affecting privacy for group work. While job types shared common ground about certain design features, the number of responses for other design features affecting privacy varied considerably across job types, or the features were not elicited by certain job types. This finding suggests that the inconsistency may be largely due to differences in work practices rather than the study's physical setting, which was generally similar for all job types. That is, in addition to those design needs that workers share in common, certain work practices may have particular architectural privacy needs that other work practices do not.