Hi everyone, As part of the Floe Project's efforts to create personalized, accessible user interfaces that can be used across a variety of Open Educational Resources, we've been working on a design framework and JavaScript toolkit for authoring multimodal charts, graphs, and other data "visualizations." One of the central goals of this effort is to make it easier for teachers, students, and content authors to represent data in "layers" consisting of different modalities--graphics, text, and audio.
To start, we've been focusing a lot on sonification, the process of representing data using sounds. We're in the midst of a very early brainstorming, sketching and idea generation process. Our work is documented in the wiki: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Floe+Sonification+Framework http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Exploration+and+Early+Sketches http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Sonification+Sketches http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Use+Cases In order to start exploring the potential of data sonification in a way that allows us to experiment with different approaches and to iterate from mockups to working implementations reasonably quickly, we've constrained our current design sketches to tools that will help authors produce multimodal "pie charts." The goal of this tool is to enable authors to produce layered representations of fairly simple data, and to give end-users the ability to explore, remap, and share their own personalized sonifications and visualizations. As part of this process, we've been exploring some new methods for how we design sonifications strategies and evaluate their effectiveness. We've started working with a small, informal group of people in a co-design context, and will also be sharing our in-progress work here on the list. What we've done so far is to prototype several different types of sonifications using low-tech tools and then shared them with people using a process of "progressive explanation." We start by having them listen to the sonification with no additional cues or explanation, asking them to describe their impressions (including how they imagine the sounds map to some underlying data set). From there, we progressively explain more about the intentions behind sonification (such as describing the sound mapping using an "audio legend"), and continue to gather impressions and ideas from our listeners. We've found this to be a very helpful process for exploring how much textual or explanatory supporting material to provide with a given sonification approach. Sepideh has posted some great examples and prototypes in the wiki. Over the coming months, we'll expand this design effort to encompass more complex data and to more interactive situations such as simulations, games, and performances. We'll continue to share ideas, sketches, and works in progress here on the mailing list, in the #fluid-design IRC channel, and in the wiki. Constructive feedback and creative ideas are always appreciated during this early stage in the process, as well as the understanding that we're still experimenting and exploring the design space. Failures and half-baked ideas are as useful at this stage in the design process as successes. Colin
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