Closing the Loop Of Sound Evaluation and Design
Patrick Susini, Nicolas Misdariis, Guillaume Lemaître, Olivier Houix, Davide Rocchesso, Pietro Polotti, Karmen Franinović, Yon Visell, Klaus Obermayer, Hendrik Purwins, Kamil Adiloğlu · 1996
Despite being a promising and lively playground, sound design is not a discipline as solid and established as visual or product design. We believe that the reason is to be found in the lack of design-oriented measurement and evaluation tools. The European project CLOSED (Closing the Loop Of Sound Evaluation and Design) aims at providing a functional-aesthetic sound measurement tool that can be profitably used by designers. At one end, this tool is linked with physical attributes of soundenhanced everyday objects; at the other end it relates to user emotional response. The measurement tool will be made of a set of easy-to-interpret indicators, which will be related to use in natural context, and it will be integrated in the product design process to facilitate the control of sonic aspects of objects, functionalities, and services encountered in everyday settings. 1. State of the Art/Design Art creation has historically been a feed-forward process in which an idea, conception, or intuition precedes the actual production of artefacts. Feedback can be found and used in several artistic contexts, but it is rarely functional to artefact development. The revolutionary contribution of the Bauhaus school in the early 20th century was to situate visual art in an iterative process incorporating analysis and prototyping, thus closing the creative loop and founding the discipline of design. What distinguishes design from art is the role played by the evaluation of functional qualities of artefacts, with the general aim of improving daily life. Measurement is the key component in any feedback control loop: the design loop is an iterative process where the input from the initial idea is iteratively compared with results fed back through the evaluation block. Another key characteristic of some great design schools of the twentieth century (Ulm, Chicago) was to encourage continuous