Potential of Application of Psychoacoustics to User/Product Interaction Design R. Sanz-Segura Design and Manufacturing Department School of Engineering and Architecture University of Zaragoza Campus Río Ebro, 50018, Spain rsanz@unizar.es E. Manchado-Pérez Design and Manufacturing Department School of Engineering and Architecture University of Zaragoza Campus Río Ebro, 50018, Spain manchado@unizar.es ABSTRACT Product design helps people to access to technological devices through the development of a product interface. It is also capable of influencing people’s interaction with others and with the environment, and of affecting the emotional response of product users, as the evolution of this activity to a new approach that can be defined as product semantics design. Thus, the product itself is a communicative system, and an understanding of it depends on the congruence of the sensorial properties perceived by the user with the concept of the product. Therefore, given that sound is one of the essential stimuli perceived by users, it is also one of the vital parameters to be configured by the designer, and the knowledge of the communicative capacities of sounds and their properties must be incorporated into the product design process. This paper reviews some of the more relevant studies in the field of sound from a perspective of its potential application to product interaction design, and critically analyses their main contributions to date and their potential application in order to contribute to the proposal for future lines of work.1 CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design → Interaction design process and methods → User interface design • Computing methodologies → Computer graphics → Graphics systems and interfaces → Perception KEYWORDS Sound design, product interaction design, methodology Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. AM '17, August 23-26, 2017, London, United Kingdom © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5373-1/17/08…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3123514.3123554 ACM Reference format: R. Sanz-Segura, E. Manchado-Pérez. 2017. Potential of Application of Psychoacoustics to User/Product Interaction Design. In Proceedings of AM '17, August 23-26, 2017, London, United Kingdom, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3123514.3123554 1 INTRODUCTION Industrial design relates people with the technological capacity of our society through the development of products. It is also capable of influencing the way in which people interact with others and with the environment, affecting their potential inclusion or exclusion as individuals. This activity has recently evolved to become a new approach that can be defined as product semantics: the importance of communication from product to user transcends mere aesthetics, extending to the concept of functionality [1]. It involves the product communicating what it is, how it works, and how it should be used, and how its functionality is provided through the success of that communicative phenomenon, while at the same time seducing and exciting the user. In this context, people develop strong emotional ties with some of the products they own, while they do not find special significance in others. The product is a communicative tool in itself, as it can provide visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory information. The congruence of its sensorial properties with the concept of the product is essential in providing the meanings that should be attributed to it. Therefore, knowledge of the communicative capacities of sounds and their properties must also be incorporated during the design process, this being one of the essential parameters to be configured by the designer. Nevertheless, and despite its relevance, this is still an emerging field and the use of sound and the way in which it can be configured as one of the main transport channels of information and meaning for the product has only recently been studied and considered. On the other hand, it is capable of greatly affecting the user’s experience of the product, interactive system or service. Thus, as an incipient discipline, susceptible of adding value to product design, it seems necessary to explore new possible lines of work, capable of feeding new knowledge. This paper reviews some of the most relevant studies on the subject from different perspectives and offers a critical analysis