Conference Agenda

Museums increasingly aim to create multisensory, immersive experiences, yet exhibition design still tends to privilege visual-first ideation and communication, risking outcomes that are photogenic rather than atmospherically coherent for visitors. This paper introduces the Atmosphere Jukebox, an interactive soundscape playback device that enables heterogeneous teams of curators, designers, architects, historians, and educators, to listen to, discuss, and negotiate sonic atmospheres in the design process. In doing so, it supports multimodal attention and a shared imagination of the affective affordances that unfold across the visitor journey. The Atmosphere Jukebox is therefore proposed as a boundary object for atmospheric staging. The contribution challenges the field’s overreliance on visual literacy in experience design and shows how a practice-based intervention can also generate new knowledge about the role of sound in shaping exhibition atmospheres. Test situations further indicate its potential in exploratory inquiry and co-design with different user groups.

Digital technologies and human-centred design approaches have transformed the cultural heritage sector, shifting the focus towards the visitor experience and advocating for collaboration between designers and non-designers. This article draws on design research and museography to discuss the role of sound in the digital cultural heritage, focusing on sound-driven exhibition design practices. The ephemeral nature of sonic experiences challenges the concept of “boundary objects”, reframing them from blueprint-like physical or abstract schemes into an Ingoldian concept of “bindings", promoting mutual understanding and collaboration across different communities. We focus here on two narrative exhibitions we were directly involved in: a participatory project based on sounds and oral stories from a local community, and a collaborative sound-driven project on musical automata involving multidisciplinary teams of professionals. The findings suggest a shift in exhibition design towards a broader understanding of sounds as “bindings”.

Recent research has established the necessity to understand sound as a service design material since its unique qualities can enhance representational design methods and contribute to the understanding, communication, and collaboration in designing complex service situations. However, much is still unknown about the role sound plays in the service design process and how the nuances related to its representational capacity influence collaborative sensemaking. This paper explores these nuances by developing a framework that allows inclusion of sound in service design practices regardless of sound-related skill level. The framework was developed based on empirical input from a master level course in service design with a specialised focus on sound. It categorises representational capacity of sound as divergent (auditory representations) and convergent (auditory prototypes) and shows how different conceptual levels (abstract vs. concrete) can have meaning-related implications (denotative vs. connotative) in collaborative design work.

Sleep is fundamental to health and well-being, yet sleep problems have risen sharply in recent years. These problems often arise from individual and contextual factors, some of which are modifiable through behaviour or design. Research examining sleep’s contextual factors and how they can inform design interventions remains limited. This article presents two connected workshops exploring these aspects of sleep using participatory and speculative design methods. The first workshop invited participants to map contextual aspects of sleep through empathy maps and speculative exercises revealing three themes affecting sleep: safety, sleep routines, and stress or anxiety. The second focused on ideation asking design students to prototype sonic interventions addressing these themes. These prototypes were analysed by a professional sound designer to identify novel design elements. Findings highlight key considerations related to agency, ethics and technology, and offer insights and a flexible participatory methodology and framework for bridging user needs and design expertise.

Sonification and visualization practices usually take "data" as a given, without considering the complex ways in which data is collected or the complexity of the phenomena that data represents. Autographic design is an emerging field approaching this issue by starting the design process before data collection with the phenomenon itself, treating data as a material trace rather than an abstract reference. An autographic display uses a phenomenon's self-inscription, rather than its mediation and representation in symbolic encodings. While the existing framework of autographic design has a strong relation to the visual domain, a phenomenon may also reveal itself through its sonic trace. The contributions of this paper are threefold. We extend autographic design into the sonic domain, introduce autographic sonification instruments, and propose a design continuum.