Listening as Agency: A Participatory Approach to Designing Institutional Soundscapes

Approaches to designing for sound in long-term care have often prioritized external and infrastructural aspects of the auditory environment, while overlooking how residents actually experience and interpret their auditory environments. Drawing on the concept of sonic agency, it examines how residents of a Vancouver long-term care home perceive and shape their soundscape. It also seeks to draw insights into changes residents would like to see within their daily soundscape. The research involved two workshops. In the first workshop, residents took part in facilitated "sound explorations," recording sounds that held personal significance. Following the sound exploration, residents shared insights in interviews regarding their reasoning for recording the selected sounds. These insights informed the development of a framework called the Sonic Ecology of Care, which conceptualizes the interconnected layers of institutional soundscapes, shaped by internal beliefs, social interactions, physical infrastructure, and policy-level factors. In the second workshop, residents reviewed the recordings and mapped the changes they would like to make in the home onto the Sonic Ecology of Care model. Setting the foundation of future participatory prototyping, the affective nature of the audio recordings communicates resident experiences beyond typical ocular-centric modes of design research.