Elif Ozcan Vieira​

Scholar in residence May to June and October 2024

Elif Ozcan Vieira conducts sound-driven design and research activities at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of TU Delft (The Netherlands) and leads the Silent ICU project at the Department of Intensive Care of Erasmus Medical Centre. She is the director of the Critical Alarms Lab (CAL) at TU Delft, where the lab members mainly investigate how to maintain or improve the well-being of listeners in complex socio-technological environments. CAL is a flexible consortium of individuals, institutes, and companies offering multiple student participation opportunities.

Sound design has always fascinated Ozcan. From her professional years as a sound designer for a popular radio station, Ozcan remembers the magical feeling of being able to give form to sounds, this seemingly intangible medium, and experiencing its immediate effect on her, both mentally and physically. However, the more she studied the theories of product experience, human behaviour, and mental processes over the years, the more she realised that there is more to designing sounds, especially sounds that belong to everyday products or environments. Recently, she co-founded the Special Interest Group on sound-driven design, “DRS SIG | SoundDD”, to bring other sound enthusiasts within the community of the Design Research Society.

Ozcan focuses on mobility, space operations, and healthcare in the applied fields, linking theoretical and applied approaches. She investigates how operators respond to audible alarms and how design can fight against alarm fatigue caused by excessive amounts of non-actionable alarms in these fields. She is also interested in improving the quality of soundscapes of complex socio-technological environments through a holistic design approach that tackles sound issues and opportunities from the perspectives of four disciplines: art, engineering, ethnography and social sciences. So far, she has collaborated with institutions such as the European Space Agency, European Astronomers, Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam, Leiden University Medical Center, and Reinier de Graaf Hospital in Delft.

Currently, she is a PI for the Vital Sounds project with Philips, the Silent and Smart ICU (SASICU) project publicly funded by the EU Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) and coordinated by Dräger and partnered by Ascom and Braun, and the Auditory Footprints project funded by Open Technology Program (OTP) of Dutch Scientific Council (NWO) and co-funded by Sorama (NL). Her future aims include to set up a research programme focusing on sound and public/environmental health,

Besides her research activities, she teaches the theory and practice of perception-driven design and specifically sound-driven design at the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. She is also the chair of the Healthcare in Shape Symposium organized by the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft.

In her free time from research activities, Ozcan likes to take photos, jog, play tennis and spend time with her husband and three daughters. This also explains her interest in advocating for women in science. She is also the Faculty Diversity Officer advising the dean and department heads on how to make the work conditions in academia more inclusive, empowering and untimately more enjoyable.

As a scholar-in-residence fellow hosted by Sandra Pauletto, Associate Professor in the Media Technology and Interaction Design division at KTH EECS, Ozcan plans to study the relationship between sound and nighttime well-being, such as sleep quality or ability to fall asleep. Her prior work on this in the topics of sleep and sound quality measurements, app design to aid patients with nighttime routines and the role of machine listening and sound source detection will be instrumental in her interactions with the Digital Futures community.

Link to the profile page of Elif Ozcan Vieira​

Contact: E.Ozcan@tudelft.nl

Photo: Copyright TUD