Welcome! We present an ongoing work aimed at understanding the constituent
concepts of the practice of sound-driven design, by means of a discourse analysis
of interviews with sound professionals. The design context we refer to is the one of
functional, yet pleasant uses of sound, such as in products and environment
like the home, the car, healthcare and so on. In the paper we discuss a paradigm shift from
designing the sound of things, to designing interaction with sound,
to making use of sound issues as proper driver of the design process.
However, the problem of designing with sound is about making sense of the so-called
semantic gap between our daily meaningful experiences of sound
and the encoded physical energy of sound.
And it refers more in general to how people
talk about, communicate, and externalize the sonic experience.
Our research question is: what do people refer to and mean when they talk about sound?
We interviewed ten professionals, three sound designers, design researchers,
expert users from the critical care, and one software engineer.
The interview script was conceived in order to elicit a discussion on
the long-term term experience of sound,
the description of the perceptual experience of sound, and eventually
at eliciting creative ideas triggered by the discussion of the two previous questions.
The transcripts were analyzed by using an automated content analysis tool
in order to explore the emerging themes and concepts associated to sound.
The tool returned 665 text blocks and 73 concepts across the four categories of participants.
So what you see in this picture is a 2D heated map of found themes in the colored circles
and the concepts included in each theme,
where a theme is a cluster of highly connected concepts,
which is named after the most ranked concept in the cluster.
The position of the four categories in red is a course indicator
of their connectedness and proximity to each theme,
and the outer circles in the map represent peripheral themes,
that I won't discuss now in this presentation.
We are more interested instead in exploring the
emerging meanings of the most relevant clusters that is sound, alarm, and people.
Here we provide the highlights resulted from the analysis of the
text blocks relative to the concepts mostly co-occurring with the concept of sound.
Sound as a concept is interchangeably used by participants to mean the product,
function, the quality of information, the presence of things and subjective responses.
Designing sound is not necessarily realizing it
and much of the effort is put into building languages and narratives to guide the user.
More interestingly, sound is something to use rather than listening to, which
is condensed in the frequent expression by the participants "I use sound to".
Sound appears as something inherently systemic, with frequent reflections on
how it provides or affects interpersonal communication, social awareness, and well-being.
And as a consequence, much of the emphasis is put on
the value of dialogue and cooperation between stakeholders.
So taken together, the sound cluster aggregates
a complex space of embodiments, situated activities, and sonic affordances.
The Alarm theme provides a picture of the elements that
potentially populate a sound-driven design context.
Of course here the critical care emerges in the foreground,
and systemic pathways become apparent, for instance regarding non-actionable alarms,
patients' awakening protocols, sensing technology, and alarm standards, which are condensed
in the quote "I would like to see a learning systems tailored to movements of the patient".
The People theme is less structured and seems rather a collection of opinions
especially from sound designers and researchers.
They are particularly concerned with issues of participation and
empowerment of stakeholders in the design process.
So to conclude the analysis of the interview returned a picture of a design practice which is
inherently embodied, situated, and participatory in its aim, yet not fully resolved.
We propose two main future research directions, that is externalizing and sharing the
tacit knowledge of sound expert in some sound sensitizing forms,
and at a more fundamental level developing a design-centered
understanding of conceptual representations of non-verbal, yet auditory expressions.