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research process |
In developing the concept in close relation to how people already perceive
and experience the environment of the city, we worked with experience
scenarios to explore the territory of system possibilities and to support
decision-making among various design criteria.
These scenarios became a means of approaching interaction questions, including:
How ‘in charge’ of the experience a user should feel? How explicit
should means of controlling the system be? Should some degree of randomness
be built in the system to maintain interest? How should it sound in situations
of unvarying sensor input values over long periods of time? For everyday
use, how similar could the same walk sound day after day without becoming
boring? What should the balance be between the influence of user and environmental
factors? How would 'invisible' factors (whether sensor-based such as pollution
or processing-based such as randomness) be perceived?
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| + 'Agnes' | + 'Jean' | + 'Joanna' | + 'Jonas' | + 'Maria' |
By exploring scenarios along an extreme range of possibilities, we defined
the boundaries of the sound design space, populated with the scenarios
as examples to relate to and to test ideas against. A map of the 'control
space' consisted of two axes describe the predominant factors influencing
the music.
The vertical axis shows the balance of body or user input versus environmental
or city input. To illustrate, 'Jonas' is a sound engineer and thinks about
music in a highly structured and systematic way. He would want a high
degree of control over the music and its sound qualities and even be able
to add or customize means of input. 'Agnes', in contrast, would only want
the system to monitor tiny variations in the environment and is not interested
in controlling the sounds herself.
The horizontal axis describes the span of possibilities from unpredictability
to user-deterministic control. To illustrate, 'Maria' roams the streets
of her city at night as a form of escape. She does not go far and often
takes the same path, but would want the music to modulate dramatically
and vary each time, implying the introduction of randomness on system
level. 'Jean', on the other hand, is a participant in the extreme sport
of climbing urban structures. Each climb is like a conquest and happens
only once. He would use Sonic City to monitor his body’s engagement
with each unique environment in a very direct way.
The scenario that we chose to implement was 'Joanna'. Balancing both active
engagement and urban discovery, Joanna would use Sonic City to rediscover
her environment as a poetic and aesthetic practice. Representing the essence
of our intentions with Sonic City, this scenario provides a foundation
for testing other variables and possible experiences and is reflected
in the mapping strategy.
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research process |