A Landscape of Design: Interaction, Interpretation and the Development of Experimental Expressive Interfaces

Abstract

This short paper presents the initial research insights of an ongoing research project that focuses upon understanding the role of landscape, its use as a resource for designing interfaces for musical expression, and as a tool for leveraging ethnographic understandings about space, place, design and musical expression. We briefly discuss the emerging research and reasoning behind our approach, the site that we are focusing on, our participatory methodology and conceptual designs. This innovative research is envisaged as something that can engage and interest the conference participants, encourage debate and act as an exploratory platform, which will in turn inform our research, practice and design.

Sounding Out Ethnography and Design: Developing Metadata Frameworks for Designing Personal Heritage Soundscapes

“…This is why autoethnography is particularly useful for understanding the more personal, untold, and complex relationships with phenomena such as sound and other intangible media. The studies are textual but other resources such as images [20] and audio recordings are also used in the study. Our methodology is derived and influenced from other studies, which take a non-theoretical position.…”

“…Unpacking the multifaceted nature of place and the part that sound plays in the making of place is complex. Looking at the literature that explores the interplay of people and place, it immediately becomes evident that this requires a multidimensional approach as it consists of several interacting factors such as affect, mobility, knowledge, beliefs, and behavior, with the most important aspects being place dependence and place identity [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. As such through these we can see that a tension that transcends spatiality exist between people-place relationships and sound can play a significant role in altering these, as it enables individuals to become emerged in space while appropriating "uncharted environment" so as to interpret and reinterpret their surroundings through it [30].…”

The Design of Future Music Technologies

“…They are an integral part of the landscape, but how do we experience and make sense of a space through sound?" [5], see [6] for a discussion on landscape, expressive interfaces and sonification.…”