Participatory designing with sound
Today’s sonic displays play a significant role in threatening the quality of our everyday lives, personal and professional.
Consequently, the interest to design sound is shifting from crafting the sound towards collaboratively understanding the role of
sound and its position in complex environments, such as healthcare and autonomous driving, in which humans and technology
must co-exist. Accordingly, the design process requires more inclusive, human-centered and technology-driven approaches to
design sonic experiences. Yet the field of industrial design lacks systematic design methods and tools to empower design teams
when they collaboratively express creativity through sound and discover sound-driven engineering solutions. Thus, with the PaDS
(Participatory Designing with Sound) project, I aim at advancing the knowledge on sound-driven design thinking in which sonic
communication (speaking about sound and experiences, imagining and representing them) is especially required within multistakeholder design teams that consist of expert (sound) designers as well as non-experts (e.g., users, manufacturers, policy makers).
The main goal of PaDS is opening sound design practices to participatory approaches, in which stakeholders are involved in the
design process as partners. The core of this project is the development of methods and representational tools to empower designers
and other stakeholders to collaboratively conceptualise, express, and communicate sound-driven designs. To reach its goal, the
PaDS project is based on a mixture of interdisciplinary approaches, including sonic interaction design, design cognition studies, and
experimental psychology: Applied research and contextual inquiry of sound issues in complex, socio-technological environments provide relevant case studies of collaborative sound design-thinking, that is investigated through protocol analysis and perceptual experiments.