Designing Auditory Displays for Team Environments

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the potential use of Ecological Interface Design (EID), with an additional attentional mapping step, to design sonifications for complex real time systems. EID aims to support the human operator’s reasoning at different levels of abstraction, so that an interface maps physical functions and measurement to higher order processes. Sonification “the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in acoustic signals for the purpose of facilitating communication or interpretation” (Kramer et. al. 1997). Several successful sonifications have been designed for a variety of tasks from data mining to physiological monitoring (Kramer et al 1997). Most sonifications are designed to be used when the user is fully focused on them rather than as a pre-attentive display. Two examples of sonification where these auditory displays are designed to supplement visual displays will be examined. The first comes from a detailed study of auditory requirements for anaesthetists in the operating room (OR); the second looks at a sonification support for landing multi engine aircraft. Both have been designed with EID modified with attentional mapping to illustrate possible methods, which may reduce cognitive workload for the operators.