A Sound-driven Approach to Design Research

Abstract

The design process is a central object of inquiry in design research: The research objective is to advance the understanding of the goal-oriented, situated nature of an activity which involves decision-making, learning and exploration for the ultimate purpose of improving the quality of life. Protocol analysis is one established technique to study the design process. Several methodologies and frameworks have been developed in order to capture the situatedness of designing, without discarding the value of describing the process in terms of variations of Analysis - Synthesis - Evaluation phases.

Protocol studies focusing on sound in design projects are scarce. One main problem concerns the capturing of design intentions and semantics embodied in non-verbal representations, in other words, how sound is used, internalised and communicated as a design concept and phenomenon.

In this talk, I will discuss a semantic-oriented methodology to study sound in design projects. Designers with a different background and expertise tend to weight the semantic articulations of sound differently in their design practice. In particular, four semantic articulations, that is - Designing [The, With, Against] Sound [For] -, are proposed as active forces driving the design process. In this view, the listening experience, rather than sound, emerges as means to enabling a continuous dialogue and collaboration with stakeholders, supported by appropriate methods and tools.

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Bio - Stefano Delle Monache

Stefano Delle Monache received his PhD in Science of Design in 2012 from Iuav University of Venice, Italy. His research interests focus on the study and design of behaviours mediated by sound, either as a display of processes or as an input medium, and span practices, methods and representations for sound-driven design, evaluation of sound in interaction, and interactive sound models for computational artefacts.

Stefano has been involved in several EU-funded research projects. He was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. His funded project, Participatory Designing with Sounds (PaDS, 2020 - 2022), contributed to extending knowledge on sound-driven design cognition, to assist designers and other actors to collaboratively create sound-driven designs. He is member of the Critical Alarms Lab at TU Delft, and co-chair of the DRS Special Interest Group on Sound-Driven Design.

Currently, he is researcher at KTH, Division of Media Technology and Interaction Design, where he is involved in the Sound for Energy project.