Designing Experiences, Shaping Futures

Discovering design research through the sonic experience

Center for Design @ Northeastern University

Published in

Center for Design

5 min readJul 7, 2022

Written by Northeastern College of Arts, Media and Design students:
Charles Daigle ’23 Electrical Engineering / Music with a Concentration in Music Technology
Jason Hoopes ’24 Computer Science / Music with a Concentration in Music Technology

Design Observatory. Understanding design through sound and data.

Fall semester of 2021, in our Embedded Audio Programming course with Professor Victor Zappi, we were approached with the opportunity to combine our class project with an ongoing effort from the Center for Design to investigate the many contexts and perspectives of interdisciplinary design across the history of design literature. At the end of June, the project was temporarily installed at the Design Research Society Conference in Bilbao, Spain.

Our early goal was to create an experiential sound installation to draw attention to the Center for Design’s newly renovated space located in a heavily trafficked spot on campus. Since we are both musicians, we used distance sensors to have dynamic interactivity to mirror the intuition behind playing an instrument. As people walk by the sensors, they hear some abstract sounds that pique their interest — as they walk closer to the CfD windows, the abstract gives way to clarity as they hear a diverse mix of spoken words, phrases, and sentences commonly associated with mentions of “design” in a large collection of Design Research Society Conference papers and Design Studies articles. Our intent was to empirically sonify the many meanings and perspectives of the word “design” from a leading global academic society that seeks to study it.

In engineering classes and at past co-ops, there is a heavy emphasis on utility, pragmatism, and efficiency, but very little room for the creative and artistic spirit. We are grateful that CfD made room for us to explore these elements during the course of this project. It may have been out of our comfort zones, but it challenged us to use different parts of our brains in concert with our engineering and computer science training.

NU students interacting with the installation at the CfD

Through working with Sara Lenzi and Professor Zappi during the project, we learned a lot about sonification as a method for representing data. It was not a trivial task to balance an interesting and engaging sonic experience, while still being able to communicate the meaning behind the data. This was dependent on both the auditory content and processing that is written into the software, as well as the physical experience that one has when interacting with the installation. This led us to conduct user testing with many sensors, of varying types and placements, to determine what the best interaction might look like. We found ourselves solving problems like: “how can the experience be discoverable, and learnable to someone who doesn’t know what it is?” and “how do we catch the attention of a passerby without being too overbearing and/or jolting?”

Solving these problems involved research, testing, evaluating, gaining insights, and iterating; Sara and Victor’s feedback and expertise were invaluable during these stages. These insights were not just isolated to this specific project either — these design research methods are applicable to the broad contexts of the interaction/experience design and engineering research processes, and will inevitably extend to much of our future work, whether in co-op or in classes.

NU students interacting with the sound sensors during Design Research Week 2022

One of the most rewarding aspects of the project’s lifecycle was seeing it transform from a simple idea to an actualized, physical experience. The Center for Design was crucial in facilitating this growth, not only in the form of mentorship, support, and feedback but also in the physical sense. Using the CfD as a fluid, collaborative workspace allowed us to frequently meet during classes and get constant feedback from anyone that was around. There were even a few instances where Professor Zappi happened to walk by, saw us working, and stopped in to give us some pointers and suggestions. The ‘open’ nature of the space remained an unparalleled resource throughout the entire project.

It was really inspiring to see the space transform during Design Research Week, filled wall to wall with the culmination of many diverse ideas and research. This served as the first real test of the installation as well, which greeted everyone in attendance with its hushed, constant whisper; serving as background noise to immerse the entire Center for Design in as much “design” as possible. The event allowed us to gain more feedback from a larger group of people, and to implement these comments in an updated, polished version of the installation.

This updated version was recently on display at the DRS2022 conference in Bilbao, where it provided some of the same ambiance and interactivity for a global audience of design researchers. Though we were not able to visit Bilbao ourselves, our hearts are warmed seeing the videos of conference-goers interacting with the installation and we can’t wait to see its future life when it comes back to the Center for Design in Boston.

The installation at DRS2022 in Bilbao

The text data used for this installation came from the CfD Design Observatory, featuring the work of CfD ‘21–22 Designer-in-Residence Steven Geofrey. The Design Observatory’s recent work includes interactive data display Design Vocabularies by Steven Geofrey and Paolo Ciuccarelli, also displayed at DRS2022 Bilbao.