Portable room dividers prove useful for dividing a space, blocking sightlines, or providing people with a sense of privacy and seclusion in an open space.
Dividers are an easy, versatile way to providing a flexible and cheap way of zoning areas, especially in settings such as offices, studios, classrooms, and shared living sites.
However, it should be borne in mind that portable room dividers aren’t necessarily right for all spaces and situations.
So while they can be handy as a highly adaptable temporary solution in many scenarios, they can’t quite replicate the soundproofing and seclusion offered by more permanent and heavy-duty structures like real brick-and-mortar walls.
In this article, we share some of the pros and cons of portable room dividers.
Quick Deploy
Portable room dividers are uncomplicated office fixtures.
Often simply a freestanding or wheeled panel made from lightweight board, fabric, or wood composite, they require minimal installation and set-up.
This means they can be quickly and easily deployed and shifted from location to location with the minimum of fuss.
Adaptable
Portable dividers and screens can be fashioned from a wide range of materials – from lightweight woods to transparent plastics.
This makes them highly adaptable to many different situations.
If true line-of-sight blocking is needed, opaque dividers can provide the shielding. However, if you are looking to separate colleagues or classmates, but want to maintain sightlines, Perspex partitions do an excellent job.
Furthermore, the panels from a company like Rap Office Screens can be emblazoned with logos and marketing messages, so if you’re looking to get your marketing message or company ethos out among visitors, a screen can be a useful branding opportunity.
Cost-Effective
Portable room dividers are often used in a public building or a private office to provide users with some privacy and noise control without having to go to the trouble of bringing in builders to construct true brick-and–mortar partitions.
Permanent walls often involve demolition of existing structures, costly construction costs and permitting.
Conversely, portable dividers can be used and reused in all manner of different settings without the need for costly restructuring and reorganising of the space.
Soundproofing
When choosing a special sound-muffling acoustic divider fabricated from a material like mineral wool (rockwool or stone wool) or fibreglass, they can also be used to block out aural distractions as well as visual ones.
These materials will make speech less sharp, but won’t contain sound moving between spaces, so if complete soundproofing is needed, a divider isn’t going to do the job.Â
Size Matters
Portable screens come in different shapes and sizes and can often be tailored to your particular space.
At the same time, it should be noted that they will not typically reach right to the ceiling in a building, meaning they will not block out all the ambient visual and aural distractions in an open-plan space.
Conclusion
Portable room dividers are a useful addition to an open plan space where you want to section off / zone out quiet spaces and areas, and partially block out visual or audial distractions.
When budgets are limited or permanent fixtures aren’t possible, dividers are a quick and easy solution to make a big transformation.
