Episode 19: DON’T BE ALARMED! - Dr. Elif Özcan (Vieira) - TU Delft & Critical Alarms Lab

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Elif Ozcan Vieira - Associate Professor in Sound-driven Design and Research at the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. She's currently working mainly in the fields of space operations, and healthcare - both of which she discusses with our host, Simon Gosling, on the show.

Top education and research are central to TU Delft, the oldest and largest technical university in the Netherlands. Their 8 faculties offer 16 bachelor's and more than 30 master's degree programs. Their more than 25,000 students and 6,000 employees share a fascination with science, design and technology. Their shared mission: impact for a better society. (Something that resonates very well with us here at Quiet Mark!)

Elif is the director of the Critical Alarms Lab (CAL), which is a new initiative of the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. CAL aims to shape the future of product-user interactions in complex environments through audible, visual, and haptic information design. The lab is a flexible consortium of individuals, institutes, and companies, and it offers multiple opportunities for student participation. 

In fact, it's that healthcare connection that brought us together because Elif was kindly introduced to us by a previous guest on our podcast, Yoko Sen, an ambient musician who's applying talents and skills to transforming the sounds of alarms in hospitals, to make them less stressful, more natural-sounding environments. This is something with which she collaborates with Elif and you'll hear Elif's own experiences of their pioneering partnership in this episode.

As an Associate Professor at the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Elif teaches and does research on `form and experience-driven and `sound-driven' design. Her academic career started at the TU Delft as well, with doing a Ph.D. study on product sounds (`Product sounds: Fundamentals and application'). With this study, she is the first to establish a comprehensive theory about product sounds based on empirical evidence.