The team pursues three major objectives on behalf of places. First, there is systematic research on the impact of places, from small-scale environments such as desktop workspaces up to large-scale environments like political unions. Second, we explore the future of work, especially regarding human-computer interaction and remote work. Third, we investigate the impact of materials on creative processes, with a focus on sound material as a complement to visuals, languangage-based or number-based work materials.
The Place-Design-Template allows you to design places in ways that encourage desired behaviours and feelings. One aim can be to encourage creative behaviour, fostering feelings of excitement and engagement. This template has emerged from multi-method research on the impact of places.
One sample project on the future of work is the Smart Garden Office, where a multi-speaker setup provides a dynamic sound field depending on the worker’s position. People can move around freely in the garden office, while maintaining a high-quality audio connection with remote collaboration partners.
Sonyx enriches the work environment for exploratory programming, based on auditory displays. Programmers are equipped with additional tooling, allowing them to inspect and monitor source code through sounds.
The project 3D Sound Spatialisation for EEG Data provides a work environment for neuroscientists, where they can explore EEG data by sound, distributed in space. Researchers can feel as though standing in the middle of a brain, listening to brain activity unfolding around them.
The project Bitalino-Based EEG Sonification creates binaural sound representations of EEG data in real time. It uses low budget technology, making the approach feasible for a variety of users.
The Sonification Playground provides a web environment, where scientists can explore any data set based on sound.
In terms of design thinking frameworks, we are interested in an overview of Place-Related Factors that impact creative performance.