The department of Industrial Design of the TU/e is offering a fully funded 2-year position to master graduates leading to the award of an EngD (Engineering Doctorate) degree in Designing Human-System Interaction. The appointment is for two years starting in March 2023.
The project
This project is part of a NWO research project that has the overall aim to establish a sustainable open-source community around room acoustics modelling software, i.e. the modelling of sound propagation in indoor spaces. A short project summary can be found below. Research in the project is conducted by a PhD student and a postdoc on room acoustics modelling and a PhD student on the open source community. The purpose of this EngD project is to develop a user interface of the developed room acoustics software that can be used by the users in the project, which consist of room acoustics consultants (engineers) and students from other universities. The project contains two loops of feedback from the users to the researchers, meaning that the user interface will be iteratively improved.
About the NWO project: To avoid noise induced health effects indoors and to promote or limit indoor speech and music transmission, suitable room acoustic modelling methods are needed. The methods available to acoustic consultants via commercial software are limited and closed. In this project, two complementary room acoustics modelling methods will be further developed and ecologically validated such that they become ready for consultancy practice. At the same time, research is conducted towards a sustainable software community around open source software, where scientists and practitioners meet to use and contribute to room acoustic prediction methods. The involvement of end users is crucial in this project. They will help to benchmark the developed modelling methods and test the prototype software of the community platform.
Tasks of the EngD project:
Understanding of the current research software in the project as written in Matlab/Python
Familiarisation with the existing software packages used by acoustic consultants, their functionality and UI
Designing a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to identify the ways prospective users (acoustic consultants) would like to interact with the system
A GenderMag cognitive walkthrough session intended to identify inclusivity bugs in the proposed user interface
Based on the insights from the experiment a first version of the user interface will be designed
A series of "field" and "lab" user studies to evaluate the software developed and its user interface. Designing such a user study will also require designing appropriate training materials/workshop.
This activity will be synchronised with updates from developments of the research software by the project researchers will be incorporated in the new version of the interface