Customizing ICU patient monitoring: a user-centered approach informed by nurse profiles

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurses are burdened by excessive number of false and irrelevant alarms generated by patient monitoring systems. Nurses rely on these patient monitoring systems for timely and relevant medical information concerning patients. However, the systems currently in place are not sensitive to the perceptual and cognitive...

Exterior sounds for electric and automated vehicles: Loud is effective

Exterior vehicle sounds have been introduced in electric vehicles and as external human–machine interfaces for automated vehicles. While previous research has studied the effect of exterior vehicle sounds on detectability and acceptance, the present study takes on a different approach by examining the efficacy of such sounds in deterring...

Acoustic Biotopes, Listeners and Sound-Induced Action: A Case Study of Operating Rooms

As socio-technological environments shape and direct listener behaviour, an ecologicalaccount is needed that encompasses listening in complexity (i.e., multiple listeners, multiple sounds and their sources, and multiple sound-induced actions that ensure the success of a mission). In this study, we explored sound-induced action under the...

Del descubrimiento a la aplicación: qué cabe esperar al diseñar con dilemas

Personal dilemmas are inspiring phenomena, which can stimulate design creativity and reflection on users’ goals and values. This paper aims to provide an overview of the main challenges involved in Dilemma-Driven Design (DDD). We first introduce three main activities performed when designing with dilemmas: Identifying dilemmas (discovery),...

Better sleep experience for the critically ill: A comprehensive strategy for designing hospital soundscapes

In this paper, the sleep phenomenon is considered in relation to critical care soundscapes with the intention to inform hospital management, medical device producers and policy makers regarding the complexity of the issue and possible modes of design interventions. We propose a comprehensive strategy based on soundscape design approach that...

From teatime cookies to rain-pants: Resolving dilemmas through design using concerns at three abstraction levels

Users often have conflicting concerns (i.e., dilemmas), such as ‘embracing change vs. following tradition.’ Design can resolve these dilemmas through simultaneously fulfilling conflicting user concerns. This paper proposes three abstraction levels for framing user concerns when formulating dilemmas. In a large-scale industry project, we...

Long-Term Goals or Immediate Desires?: Introducing a Toolset for Designing with Self-Control Dilemmas

This paper suggests that designers can frame user behaviour in terms of the conflicts between long-term goals and immediate desires (i.e. self-control dilemmas), and address these conflicts by facilitating the pursuit of long-term goals. A phenomenological study provided an understanding of self-control dilemmas and the strategies people use to...

Auditory and visual contributions to affective product quality

A product has multiple sensory properties, each of which can be evaluated on its affective quality. In the current study, we investigated differences in the evaluation of the affective quality of auditory and visual product appearances and their potential contribution to the overall (auditory-visual) affective quality of domestic appliances....

Product sounds: Basic concepts and categories

In this paper we investigated which categories of product sounds listeners can distinguish. We explored the perceptual domain of product sounds in order to be able to derive perceptually similar categories and determine how users are able to describe these categories by merely listening to them. Employing two different experimental paradigms ...

The Harley effect: Internal and external factors that facilitate positive experiences with product sounds

Everyday activities are laden with emotional experiences involving sound. Our interactions with products (shavers, hairdryers, electric drills) often cause sounds that are typically unpleasant to the ear. Yet, we may get excited with the sound of an accelerating Harley Davidson because the rumbling sound represents adventure or an espresso...

Basic semantics of product sounds

Product experience is a result of sensory and semantic experiences with product properties. In this paper, we focus on the semantic attributes of product sounds and explore the basic components for product sound related semantics using a semantic differential paradigmand factor analysis. With two experiments, we determined eight factors that...