Acoustic partitions and screens are passive treatments that reduce reverberation and partially attenuate sound transmission — they improve the open-floor acoustic environment but do not create enclosed acoustic spaces with certified bidirectional speech privacy. Their DS,A equivalent is typically 8–15 dB — below the 25 dB minimum that meaningfully reduces the ISE for focused work. HIGHKA pods provide DS,A = 29.4 dB of certified full-enclosure acoustic isolation — a different category of acoustic performance that enables genuine speech privacy, ISE elimination, and professional video call quality that screen-based solutions cannot achieve. In agile office design, both have a role: screens and panels improve the open-floor ambient; pods create the enclosed focus and meeting zones.