Abstract
Sound is one of the major elements in any servicescape. Be it the instant hiss of a coffee machine and light jazzy music in a coffee shop or the constant beep of medical equipment and sporadic human voices in a solitary hospital room, sounds profoundly influence human experience and drive our interactions with the world. Although sound plays an important role in design disciplines such as product and interaction design, its role in service design has surprisingly been quite muted. In contributing to the plurality theme, this workshop explores the role of sound in service design, especially its potential in informing and augmenting visual representations used to materialize different elements of service systems. For example, what information could a sounding stakeholder map reveal that could not be transferred though the visual means? Or how can we make visual representations more inclusive through sound?
Working with performative sonic exercises, such as scenario-based sonic blueprint, we aim to explore the interdependencies of visual and auditory representations. Together with the participants, we aim to explore and discover possibilities for novel methodological and practical insights that this integration of auditory and visual can bring. Participants are not required to have any musical training or specific knowledge to participate in this workshop. Therefore, we invite the ServDes community of various backgrounds to join us in experiencing and cocreating the sounding representations and help us to jointly reflect on the possibilities this can have for service design research and practice.
Keywords
service design, visual representations, auditory representations, sound
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2020.65
Citation
Kuštrak Korper, A., Rodrigues, V., Blomkvist, J.,and Holmlid, S.(2021) Sounds good! Auditory representations in service design, in Akama, Y., Fennessy, L., Harrington, S., & Farago, A. (eds.), ServDes 2020: Tensions, Paradoxes and Plurality, 2–5 February 2021, Melbourne, Australia. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2020.65
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Papers
Sounds good! Auditory representations in service design
Sound is one of the major elements in any servicescape. Be it the instant hiss of a coffee machine and light jazzy music in a coffee shop or the constant beep of medical equipment and sporadic human voices in a solitary hospital room, sounds profoundly influence human experience and drive our interactions with the world. Although sound plays an important role in design disciplines such as product and interaction design, its role in service design has surprisingly been quite muted. In contributing to the plurality theme, this workshop explores the role of sound in service design, especially its potential in informing and augmenting visual representations used to materialize different elements of service systems. For example, what information could a sounding stakeholder map reveal that could not be transferred though the visual means? Or how can we make visual representations more inclusive through sound?
Working with performative sonic exercises, such as scenario-based sonic blueprint, we aim to explore the interdependencies of visual and auditory representations. Together with the participants, we aim to explore and discover possibilities for novel methodological and practical insights that this integration of auditory and visual can bring. Participants are not required to have any musical training or specific knowledge to participate in this workshop. Therefore, we invite the ServDes community of various backgrounds to join us in experiencing and cocreating the sounding representations and help us to jointly reflect on the possibilities this can have for service design research and practice.