Listening
to the heart of Business
Using Ambient Auditory Displays in a working environment to
monitor live business metrics
The Media Direction master project
"Listening to the Heart of Business" will examine the practical use
and effectiveness of ambient auditory displays[1]
in a working environment to enable employees to constantly monitor live metrics
of relevance to their business.
The major aim is to design, develop and evaluate
possible applications for different scenarios to use data sonification[2],
auditory displays and ambient displays to give employees the possibility to
constantly monitor business relevant data without being distracted or having to
dig through graphs and hard numbers. While being acoustically immersed into a
customizable sonic representation of business metrics, the user will only be
distracted when important events happen.
The hypothesis of the “Listening to the Heart
of Business” project states, that the use of ambient auditory displays will
enable companies to subtly stay on top of their data and take immediate action a
lot faster when major events occur. This hypothesis will be challenged through
research in the fields of auditory and ambient displays. Afterwards,
prototyping and the implementation of an auditory display inside a working
environment will be the next step to set the stage for qualitative user
studies. The data gathered by these user studies will then be evaluated and
interpreted to be held against the original hypothesis.
Various different approaches taking the laws of
psycho acoustics, sound design and data sonification into account will be tested
in combination with and/or in absence of visual representations in a live
working environment to improve and sharpen the tools for metric sonification as
well as evaluating the benefits of implementing such a system in a live working
environment.
The working environment for this project will
be the DataShaka[3] office in London.
[1] “Systems that employ soniļ¬cation for
structuring sound and furthermore include the transmission chain leading to
audible perceptions and the application context” From: Hermann, T. 2008. “Taxonomy and Definitions for
Sonification and Auditory Display”, Faculty of Technology, University
Bielefeld, Germany (Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Auditory
Display, Paris, France June 24 - 27, 2008)
[2] “The
use of nonspeech audio to convey information”. From: Sonification.de.
2010. sonification.de »
definition. [online] Available at: http://sonification.de/son/definition
[Accessed: 5 Aug 2013].
[3] Datashaka.com. n.d.. Putting data at the heart of
business -. [online] Available at: http://datashaka.com/ [Accessed: 5 Aug
2013].
The project description for the thesis as PDF can be found on google docs here.
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