Exploration of sonification design process through an interdisciplinary workshop

In sonification of scientific data, designers know very little about the domain science and domain scientists are not familiar with the sonification methodology. The knowledge about the domain science is not given, but evolved during the problem-solving process. We discuss design challenges in auditory display design regarding user-centered approaches and suggest a method to involve domain scientists throughout sonification designs. We explore this within a workshop in which sonification experts, domain experts, and programmers worked together to better understand and solve problems collaboratively. The sonification framework that is used during the workshops is briefly described and the workshop process and how each group worked together during the workshop sessions are examined. Participants worked on pre-defined and exploratory tasks to sonify climate data. Furthermore, they grasped each other's domains; climate scientists especially became more open to use auditory display and sonification as a tool in their data mining tasks. Resulting sonification prototypes and workshop sessions are documented on a wiki to be used by the sonification community. To get started, we used some of the sonification designs created during the workshop for an online study where participants from science, engineering, and humanities were asked questions about the data behavior by listening to sonifcations of bivariate time series. Results indicate that sonic representation of data from resulting sonification allows most users (even with little or no knowledge of sound and music) to successfully complete some common data exploration tasks.