So to turn the corner from experience observation - home offices come with uncontrolled, unwelcome noise - to Experience Design...

While you work at home, you'd prefer a "Suburban Office" soundscape. While I sit in a hotel room, I might feel more at home with a "Suburban Family after Dinner" soundscape. Soundscape Architects could either crank out generic soundscapes or develop custom packages. They could use either recorded or real-time sound gathered from either similar or completely custom sources.

The design part is to figure out the right place between living completely with the sound of the place you're in and experiencing completely the sound of the actual place you want to be.

Early versions of this are of course in place, from Muzak to Sound Machines

Reality is that your neighbors want to pay for heavy equipment gardening, and figure, with some reason, that people at home are not trying to concentrate on work. To change that reality - asking them to not use power tools, persuading them to hire Japanese specialists, exposing them to your need for quiet - is hard. To design around it with Soundscapes will be to treat your acoustic reality the same way we've grown accustomed to treating weather reality - as optional. But audio reality - as people talking on cellphones in public are learning, and as people listening to Walkmans and Boomboxes before them learned - is part of the negotiated social arena. And what we do to alter it has consequences for our relationships with others.

Of course this is all a matter of degree. When you alter weather reality by sitting in your home on a sweltering day with the AC cranked all the way up, you distance yourself pretty dramatically from the lives of the guys pushing around the (loud) mowers outdoors....