Design

The design of open public spaces often neglects the acoustic needs of users. Accessibility within the public realm is considered widely in terms of mobility and often in terms of visual accessibility. However, the needs of aurally diverse individuals such as those with hearing impairments or sensory processing sensitivities, are commonly neglected. Due to their nature, soundscapes in open public soundscapes can be overwhelming or inaccessible, impacting the ability of those with diverse needs to experience the built environment.

PhD proposals are sought that will explore material solutions that affect and enhance auditory inclusivity in open public spaces. A research by design methodology may be adopted. Themes can also focus on exploring spatial configurations and their combination with material explorations to create spaces that are inclusive of the auditory needs of the users.  This may involve the creation of zoning combined with sound-absorbing surfaces, materials, and spatial layouts that dampen high-impact sounds. The outputs are expected to inform guidelines and policy for the design of public open spaces.

Supervisor: Athena Moustaka

Architectural spaces dominated by concrete, can influence the auditory experiences of individuals, with potential implications for neurodiverse populations. By considering factors such as reverberation, echo, and ambient noise levels the research aims to propose design principles and interventions that can enhance soundscapes in concrete-heavy spaces to better address the experiences of neurodivergent individuals.

Supervisor:  Athina Moustaka

This PhD examines how architectural ‘giga-projects’, futures of cyber-physical actual-virtual habitat arcologies, reassemble and spatialise diverse, posthuman aural experiences. It evidences the extent to which new designs on future urban spaces take into account principles of inclusive design to optimize the auditory journeys of inhabitants and, specifically, of neurodiverse inhabitants and how these change around neurological enhancements: central to the studentship is a transhuman critique of design normativities. Focussing on the speculative and design fictioning stage of visionary architectural commissions, the researcher will critically examine, exhibition material, design models, and immersive environments to identify, understand and evidence examples of reflective practice within the design process which take into account a range of cyborg-auditory-augmentations (recovery and enhancement). The project is framed and supported by Miah’s posthumanist ethical theory, the methodologies of designfiction  (Hales 2013, 2015) and visionary architectural research of Hales ( Hales & Spiller 2024). The project also draws insight from the UK’s Sound and Music Organisations Ways of Hearing programme (Hales, 2011), listening in cyborgian geographies; noise and sonic fiction (Hales 2012); noise machines in speculative design (Hales 2015); and algorithms and mechanisms in speculative hardware and listening to machine noise (Hales 2016). The research seeks to reassemble and spatialise an ecology of diverse and posthuman aural experiences – amongst these are emergent techneurodiversities (post- and trans-human modes of listening), new capacities for how  bodies – as multiplicities (digitally twinned human bodies, cyber physically augmented bodies avatarchitectures and so on) perceive and enter into new reflexive relations with sonic constructs and acoustic materialities. The studentship seeks understanding of the impact of the emerging reflexive soundscapes of cyberphysical arcologies on its people-to-come – that is to say for its neurodiverse biological (human/non-human) and non-biological (AI, IoT) populations.

Applicant Skills: architectural acoustics, design, social science, immersive technologist.

Impact Potential: work towards international standards for inclusive hybrid urban design on auditory diversity; acoustic tools; policy contribution.

Methodologies: Mixed Methods/ Artistic research ( speculative design); diegetic prototyping of soundscape modelling ; mapping socio-material design practice and policy; anthropology of design.

Supervisors: Derek Hales and Andy Miah

The research proposal sets out to explore sonic urbanisms and soundscapes as an extended sociotechnical (Latour, 2005; Simondon, 1958/2017) and eco-infrastructural (Bélanger, 2009; Easterling, 2016; Morton, 2010) mode of capitalist extraction. It examines how global infrastructure and regeneration projects like Ocean Gateway in the Northwest of England reassemble and spatialise an urban economy of diverse aural experiences.

Using the Manchester Ship Canal (MSC) corridor as its empirical site, the proposal develops a design fiction (Hales, 2013, 2025) for a speculative logistics scenario where this strategic corridor transforms into an autonomous robotic geography—a multi-scalar landscape where autonomous aerial and surface vehicles operate independently. The MSC corridor is viewed not merely as a site of commerce and transportation but as an anthropological (Schober & Leivestad, 2022) and communicative space (Mattern, 2023; Peters, 2015; Starosielski, 2015), embedding material (Hutton, 2020), logistical (Cowen, 2014; LeCavalier, 2016), and technological (Nesbit & Waldheim, 2022; Shayya, 2021) trajectories within its environment. Through this lens, the corridor is conceived as a site for futuring sonic design fictions by “terraining” (Shayya, 2021) the prospects and potentialities of aural experiences in urban plans. This methodology aims to understand and anticipate the impact of extractive soundscapes on surrounding human and non-human populations. The inquiry proposes hybrid methods for its research design to formulate an epistemology of “aural technics.” Although the specific techniques are yet to be determined, Shayya’s work on “terraining,” a process where obstacles become the means of realisation and Hales’s prior research on listening in cyborgian geographies (2011), noise and sonic fiction (2012), noise machines in speculative design (2015), and genetic algorithms and listening to machine noise (2016) provide points of departure.

Supervisors: Fadi Shayya and Derek Hales