Sketching Sonic Interaction Design

Sketching and Experience Design – Buxton

Posted by michal under Sketching

Buxton’s influential book on Sketching made such an impact in the User experience community that some have labeled 2008 the “Year of the Sketch”. Though prototyping user experiences has been a topic of interest for a long time, Buxton managed to bring this topic to a wider audience, as well as to contextualize it within other forms of sketching in the design world and design history.

Anyway… got an extra 90 minutes?
Watch Bill Buxton in a somewhat unfocused presentation in Stanford on “Sketching and Experience Design”.

Inger Ekman’s thoughts on sonic sketching

Posted by admin under Meet the people, Sketching, Voice

Inger Ekman will be attending the workshop and co-hosting the vocal sketching session.
Here are some thoughts she posted on her blog, about the workshop and about sonic sketching:

“What does sonic sketching mean, then? Well, I suspect a part of this workshop will be precisely finding out that. As of now, there really is no established design methodology for working with sound, especially in the prototyping stage. Sound doesn’t have its storyboards, or paper prototypes.

What I use a lot, however, is the voice. There are really so many awesome things you can do with your voice, even without that much training. But with a little training, and a huge amount of self-confidence, the voice can become a very useful prototyping tool. Foreign languages, for example, are a great way to learn to make new sounds. How about these Xhosa sounds for a starter? And if you train a little (or a lot) more, you can do quite a lot just with your voice. Just listen to this lovely Pink Panther theme by Bobby McFerrin. Or how about a little polyharmonic singing – yeah, thats when you sing two tones at the same time. So how about using this cool device of ours for vocal prototyping?

Having worked with different experience prototyping methods in the past, I’ve always felt there is a special tug in people’s stomachs whenever they start prototyping something that sounds. The voice is just so personal! Working to overcome these comfort barriers, both by myself personally and together with other designers, research colleagues, and students, has been quite interesting! I guess being an extrovert really helps in a field like this.”

Cool. We look forward to seeing you here, Inger!

Sketch-To-Photo

Posted by admin under Applications, Sketching

An application that creates a composite photo from users’ sketches, by retrieving compatible images from the web. The sketch has to have text labels attached to it for the algorithm to work well, though…
Created by researchers at Tsinghua University.

Sonic Sketching??!

Posted by michal under Sketching

Here’s the way we define the topic of the workshop, copied off the formal workshop website:

Sonic Interaction Design (SID) is the discipline that investigates the use of sound in interactive experiences. As technologies become more miniaturized and embedded, and their users more mobile, interactive sound becomes increasingly important. The experiences offered by sonic interactions need to be effectively and beautifully designed.

Sketching is a fundamental part of the design process. Designers sketch ideas for objects, spaces, interactions, experiences. Bill Buxton’s recent book, “Sketching User Experiences”, has laid out a palette of methods for sketching interactive experiences, that involve different forms of “visual storytelling”.

But how do we sketch when designing sonic interactions? This is the question at the core of this workshop. What is the equivalent for paper and pen when we come to design interactions that use sound as a main output?

A central topic in this workshop will be the use of the voice – vocal sketching – as one means of sketching sonic interactions. Can the voice for sound designers play a similar role as that played by the hand for the graphic designer? how can, and how do, people use their voice in the initial stages of designing sonic interactions?