Sara Lenzi

There is a growing interest in the role of the senses in the perception, understanding of, and relationship with environmental change (Lenzi et al., 2025). Sound, light, and smell are all believed to contribute to defining the relationship of an environment with those who inhabit it (Lindborg et al., 2024). Animals also perceive the environment in a multimodal manner using cues from smells, sounds, and sights to operate, especially in uncertain conditions (Munoz et al., 2012). Among the sensory modalities, sound - and the act of listening - received the most attention in research, with its beneficial impact on community health and well-being, as well as the restorative potential of sound, being extensively documented (Levenhagen et al., 2021).In recent years, artists, designers, and activists have started to engage with sound-driven practices to increase the public understanding of how the environment behaves, changes, and ultimately challenges us (Lenzi and Ciuccarelli, 2022). In this presentation, we focus on how sound artists and sonification designers are employing sound in response to climate change scenarios and environmental variables. We explore the potential of sound to offer an emotional, experiential and embodied engagement with environmental data, and provide new possibilities for the perception and understanding of environmental change.Through the analysis of 55 projects, we will reflect on two distinct approaches: a) data sonification, i.e. the translation of environmental data into an auditory artifact for data exploration and engagement, and b) speculative sonic processes, i.e. the use of climate change scenarios and speculative storytelling for the manipulation of environmental sounds as a means of communication and engagement. Based on a method defined for the analysis of the Data Sonification Archive (Lenzi et al., 2020), projects will be analysed based on the author’s intention (e.g., art, public engagement, activism, journalism), the type of source data (e.g., the environmental phenomenon that data represent), the expected audience (e.g., experts, general public).Selected cases will be presented in depth, such as the sound works Water-drought patterns (Panourgia, 2023) and Soil narrations (Panourgia, 2024) that shape environmental sounds as a way to imagine change in future landscapes from a more-than-human perspective. The presentation will be an opportunity for participants not only to reflect on the potential of sound as a means of improving individual and collective sensemaking of environmental phenomena, but also to engage in the first person in listening as an act of knowledge and engagement with the complexity of such phenomena.

Climate change demands innovative and holistic approaches to urban design that address both the tangible and intangible challenges posed by a rapidly evolving environment. This article explores the necessity of a transdisciplinary approach to climate adaptation in urban spaces, emphasizing the integration of architecture, social innovation, more-than-human design, and multisensory analysis. We examine the current approaches and controversies of architectural and urban solutions to climate adaptation. Drawing on the state-of-the-art from key fields, we discuss the potential of Nature-based Solutions, co-creation practices, and multimodal design to create adaptive urban spaces that address the physical, emotional, and social needs of human and more-than-human inhabitants. The article reviews emerging frameworks and case studies, including climate shelters, biodiversity-inclusive design, and the integration of soundscapes and smellscapes, to demonstrate the importance of considering diverse perspectives and stakeholders. By synthesizing these findings, we propose an integrated design framework for climate adaptation that moves beyond traditional architectural approaches by overlapping intangible layers of social awareness, ecological diversity, and cultural sensitivity.

Urban public space faces increasing challenges due to the accelerating impacts of climate change, necessitating a paradigm shift in how cities adapt their built environments. This paper presents a case study on integrating Nature-based Solutions(NbSs) with urban infrastructure, focusing on the design and development of Urban Oasis, a modular and multi-sensory urban furniture system. Urban Oasis functions as a climate adaptation tool, incorporating rain gardens to manage stormwater, mitigate urban heat island effects, and enhance biodiversity while integrating smart features such as climate sensors, irrigation systems, lighting, speakers, and electric vehicle chargers. Through a practice-based design methodology, the study explores how transdisciplinary collaboration can inform the development of adaptive, resilient, and equitable urban interventions. The findings demonstrate the potential of NbS-integrated urban infrastructure to address the complexities of climate adaptation while enhancing social, ecological, and technological resilience. The results, validated through an integrated design checklist, contribute to ongoing discussions on urban design frameworks, emphasizing a multi-layered and systemic approach that intertwines architecture, social innovation, multi-species design, and sensory engagement to reimagine public space for future climate resilience.

Urban public space faces increasing challenges due to the accelerating impacts of climate change, necessitating a paradigm shift in how cities adapt their built environments. This paper presents a case study on integrating Nature-based Solutions (NbS) with urban infrastructure, focusing on the design and development of Urban Oasis, a modular and multi-sensory urban furniture system. Urban Oasis functions as a climate adaptation tool, incorporating rain gardens to manage stormwater, mitigate urban heat island effects, and enhance biodiversity, while integrating smart features such as climate sensors, irrigation systems, lighting, speakers, and electric vehicle chargers. Through a practice-based design methodology, the study explores how transdisciplinary collaboration can inform the development of adaptive, resilient, and equitable urban interventions. The findings demonstrate the potential of NbS-integrated urban infrastructure to address the complexities of climate adaptation while enhancing social, ecological, and technological resilience. The results, validated through an integrated design checklist, contribute to ongoing discussions on urban design frameworks, emphasizing a multi-layered and systemic approach that intertwines architecture, social innovation, multi-species design, and sensory engagement to reimagine public space for future climate resilience.

En las últimas décadas, el crecimiento en la generación y uso de datos ha transformado nuestras interacciones sociales y tecnológicas. Impulsado por la digitalización y la expansión de tecnologías como el Internet de las Cosas y las redes sociales, ha presentado desafíos en la interpretación y aplicación de datos para generar conocimiento práctico y tomar decisiones. El oído humano, como el primer sentido desarrollado, desempeña un papel crucial en nuestra percepción del entorno desde antes del nacimiento. La capacidad para detectar y analizar sonidos ambientales es explorada en el campo de los paisajes sonoros desde la década de 1960. La pandemia de COVID-19 ha destacado la profunda influencia de los sonidos urbanos en nuestra vida diaria, revelando cómo la ausencia de ruidos puso de relieve la omnipresencia de sonidos humanos como el tráfico y las actividades callejeras. En entornos tecnológicamente avanzados, el diseño sonoro cumple funciones prácticas y emocionales. Desde alertar sobre el estado de máquinas hasta mejorar la experiencia del usuario en cine, juegos digitales e industria automotriz, el diseño sonoro se ha consolidado como una herramienta poderosa. La sonificación de datos emerge como técnica innovadora para representar grandes conjuntos de datos mediante el sonido, complementando las visualizaciones tradicionales.

This paper reports on the Lab that the authors conducted during the DRS2024 conference. Through novel concepts of "Auditory Footprint," the authors aimed at exploring and highlighting the perceptual and ecological dimensions of sound events in both private and public spaces. During the DRS2024 Lab, multidisciplinary experts explored AI’s capacity to interpret and influence human interactions with soundscapes, proposing speculative-use cases, and addressing challenges such as subjective perception, equitable data collection, and ethical considerations. The findings advocate for a responsible integration of SoundAI technologies, aiming to foster accessibility, environmental awareness, and community well-being, while mitigating risks. Future work will formalize frameworks for AI-based sound applications and explore policy and technical feasibility.

The research communities studying visualization and sonification for data display and analysis share exceptionally similar goals, essentially making data of any kind interpretable to humans. One community does so by using visual representations of data, and the other community employs auditory (non‐speech) representations of data. While the two communities have a lot in common, they developed mostly in parallel over the course of the last few decades. With this STAR, we discuss a collection of work that bridges the borders of the two communities, hence a collection of work that aims to integrate the two techniques into one form of audiovisual display, which we argue to be “more than the sum of the two.” We introduce and motivate a classification system applicable to such audiovisual displays and categorize a corpus of 57 academic publications that appeared between 2011 and 2023 in categories such as reading level, dataset type, or evaluation system, to mention a few. The corpus also enables a meta‐analysis of the field, including regularly occurring design patterns such as type of visualization and sonification techniques, or the use of visual and auditory channels, showing an overall diverse field with different designs. An analysis of a co‐author network of the field shows individual teams without many interconnections. The body of work covered in this STAR also relates to three adjacent topics: audiovisual monitoring, accessibility, and audiovisual data art. These three topics are discussed individually in addition to the systematically conducted part of this research. The findings of this report may be used by researchers from both fields to understand the potentials and challenges of such integrated designs while hopefully inspiring them to collaborate with experts from the respective other field.

The hospital soundscape is known for high noise levels and a perception of chaos, leading to concerns about its impact on patients, families, professionals, and other hospital staff. This study investigates the relationship between sound, Annoyance, and sleep quality in a multi-patient neurology ward. A mixed-methods approach was employed. Interviews were conducted with medical staff (n = 7) to understand their experiences with sound. Questionnaires and sleep tracking devices (n = 20) assessed patient sleep quality and Annoyance caused by sound events. In addition, listeners (n = 28) annotated 429 nighttime audio recordings to identify sound sources and rate Annoyance level, which we considered the key emotional descriptor for patients. Over 9,200 sound events were analysed. While snoring, a patient-generated sound dominated the nighttime soundscape and was highly rated for Annoyance, and staff-generated sounds such as speech and footsteps were found to contribute more to accumulated Annoyance due to their extended duration. This study suggests that patient sleep quality can be improved by focusing on design interventions that reduce the impact of specific sounds. These might include raising awareness among staff about activities that might produce annoying sounds and implementing strategies to mitigate their disruptive effects.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown meant a greatly reduced social and economic activity. Sound is of major importance to people’s perception of the environment, and some remarked that the soundscape was changing for the better. But are these anecdotal reports based in truth? Has traffic noise from cars and airplanes really gone down, so that more birdsong can be heard? Have socially distanced people quietened down? This article presents a case study of the human perception of environmental sounds in an urban neighborhood in the Basque Country between 15 March and 25 May 2020. The social restrictions imposed through national legislation divided the 69-day period into three phases. We collected observations, field audio recordings, photography, and diary notes on 50 days. Experts in soundscape and architecture were presented with the recordings, in randomized order, and made two separate perceptual analyses. One group (N = 11) rated the recordings for pleasantness and eventfulness using an adapted version of the Swedish Soundscape Quality Protocol, and a partly overlapping group (N = 12) annotated perceived sound events with free-form semantic labels. The labels were systematically classified into a four-level Taxonomy of Sound Sources, allowing an estimation of the relative amounts of Natural, Human, and Technological sounds. Loudness and three descriptors developed for bioacoustics were extracted computationally. Analysis showed that Eventfulness, Acoustic Complexity, and Acoustic Richness increased significantly over the time period, while the amount of Technological sounds decreased. These observations were interpreted as reflecting changes in people’s outdoor activities and behavior over the whole 69-day period, evidenced in an increased presence of Human sounds of voices and walking, and a significant shift from motorized vehicles toward personal mobility devices, again evidenced by perceived sounds. Quantitative results provided a backdrop against which qualitative analyses of diary notes and observations were interpreted in relation to the restrictions and the architectural specifics of the site. An integrated analysis of all sources pointed at the temporary suspension of human outdoor activity as the main reason for such a change. In the third phase, the progressive return of street life and the usage of personal mobility vehicles seemed to be responsible for a clear increase in Eventfulness and Loudness even in the context of an overall decrease of Technological sounds. Indoor human activity shared through open windows and an increased presence of birdsong emerge as a novel characteristic element of the local urban soundscape. We discuss how such changes in the acoustic environment of the site, in acoustic measurements and as perceived by humans, point toward the soundscape being a crucial component of a comprehensive urban design strategy that aims to improve health and quality of life for increasingly large and dense populations in the future.

Data sonification is a practice for conducting scientific analysis through the use of sound to represent data. It is now transitioning to a practice for communicating and reaching wider publics by expanding the range of languages and senses for understanding complexity in data-intensive societies. Communicating to wider publics, though, requires that authors intentionally shape sonification in ways that consider the goals and contexts in which publics relate. It requires a specific set of knowledge and skills that design as a discipline could provide. In this article, we interpret five recent sonification projects and locate them on a scale of intentionality in how authors communicate socially relevant issues to publics.