Extending Ecological Interface Design to Auditory Displays

We have proposed an extension of Ecological Interface Design (EID) to encompass the design of auditory displays. Our analysis shows that EID can succeed in this task if all stages of Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) are employed and if an extra “attentional mapping” stage is added, which maps the attentional need of the human operators. A review of auditory perception and attention suggests that the critical design problem is how to facilitate the movement of sound into focal awareness when the system is abnormal and out of focal awareness when the system is normal. Current knowledge of the shift in auditory attention is limited but developing in the sonification community.