Loud by design
Press Feature
SPOR Group's acquisition of Squaredot was featured in Insider Media (Midlands) on 15 September 2026, under the headline "Interior design consultancy acquired by workplace tech firm: 'strong platform for future growth.'" The article covers the deal itself, Squaredot's design expertise, and the combined client base the two businesses now bring together.
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Here's a pattern we've seen play out again and again over 25 years of workplace design: the brochure shows an airy, open-plan floor with people collaborating happily side by side. Six months after move-in, half the floor is wearing headphones, and the other half has colonised the phone booths just to hear themselves think.
It's not usually anyone's fault. It's just what happens when open-plan space gets designed around how it looks, rather than around what it actually sounds like once it's full of people.
Why this keeps happening
Most open-plan fit-outs get designed to answer the wrong question. The brief asks, "How do we fit everyone into an open, collaborative floor?" instead of "What does this floor actually sound like at 11am on a Tuesday with every desk full?" Those two questions produce very different results.
A few reasons the gap opens up:
Acoustics get treated as a finishing touch. Sound absorption and zoning get value-engineered out late, after the layout is already locked.
Everyone's noise floor is different. A layout that's fine for a sales team on the phone all day is unworkable for a team that needs to concentrate in silence.
The quiet spaces don't match the demand. A couple of small booths for an entire floor of people who all need to escape the noise at the same time.
Each of these is a small mismatch on its own. Together, they're enough to turn an open, collaborative floor into a space people actively try to avoid.
What changes when acoustic planning starts from real behaviour, not the render
We recently joined SPOR Group, a workplace technology specialist that spends as much time understanding how people actually use a building as we spend designing it. The point of bringing the two together isn't just resourcing, it's sequencing.
When you can see how loud a space genuinely gets, which teams need focus time and when, how often people leave the floor just to get some quiet, noise stops being an afterthought. You zone the space around real working patterns, put the right materials and layout in from the start, and size the quiet spaces for actual demand rather than a token couple of booths.
It sounds obvious written down. It's rarer in practice than it should be.
What this means if you've got a move or refit coming up
If your open-plan floor is quieter on paper than it is in reality, it's worth asking whether the layout was designed around how the space would sound in use, or around how it would look in a render. That question tends to explain a lot.
We've pulled together what we're seeing across the market right now, how organisations are actually using their space, where hybrid working is heading, and what's shaping smarter workplace decisions, in The Dynamic Workplace 2026 Report.
It's a useful benchmark whether you're at the start of planning a project or just want to see how your current workplace stacks up.
