My journey into audio did not begin as a technical choice, or even as a conscious design strategy. It began with discomfort.
Again and again, in my research and teaching, I saw how effortlessly text positioned itself as the default. Instructions, consent forms, rules of play, explanations of systems — all written, all assumed readable. Even participatory design, which claims openness and inclusion, quietly leans on literacy as its entry ticket. If you cannot read fluently, participation is mediated, delayed, outsourced, or denied.
At first, I tried to counter this with images.
I designed recipes without words. Visual puzzles that stood in for official letters. Symbolic instructions that could be negotiated together at a table. These artefacts — many developed in collaboration with community partners and students through Creating010 — taught me something important: removing text does not automatically remove hierarchy. Visuals still require interpretation. Someone often still “knows better.”
Audio entered my practice almost accidentally, but once it did, it never left.
When I first replaced written instructions with a spoken voice, something shifted. People no longer scanned ahead. There was no shortcut. No skimming. Time became shared. Everyone received information at the same pace, in the same order, with the same uncertainty. Audio flattened the room in a way text rarely does.
This is when I realised: audio is not simply an alternative medium — it is a different mode of participation.
Unlike text, audio cannot be consumed selectively without consequence. You cannot jump to the conclusion without missing the middle. You cannot correct someone else’s interpretation by pointing at a sentence. You must listen. And listening, especially collective listening, changes behaviour. It slows people down. It introduces pauses, misunderstandings, silences. And those silences turned out to be productive.
Before I arrived at the hexagon, however, I experimented with a different way of holding what was heard.
In an early iteration, participants listened to audio while working with a structured note form. This form contained open space and a set of illustrations intended as inspiration for visual note-taking — not as instructions, not as symbols with fixed meaning. What happened surprised me. The illustrations did not remain peripheral. They became part of the notes themselves. Participants drew connecting lines between images, added small drawings, circled elements, and marked moments that stood out to them. The page slowly filled with traces of listening: not just what was said, but how it was understood and remembered.
These visual notes clearly supported comprehension. They helped participants recall details and make sense of the information. But they also revealed a tension. The focus subtly shifted back to content: to understanding correctly, to capturing meaning, to producing something coherent on paper. Heads went down. Pages filled up. The shared uncertainty that audio had introduced began to close.
That moment mattered.
I realised that while visual note-taking supported understanding, it also pulled attention away from the experience I was trying to foreground: what it feels like to be addressed by a system, and what values are implied in that address. The notes stabilised meaning too quickly. They made the audio manageable, personal, and contained.
It was after this that I moved toward working with hexagons and values.
More recently, I began to connect audio experiences to explicit reflection on values. In one early test, I introduced a hexagon-based mapping tool after a shared listening experience. Participants were invited to reflect not on the content of the audio, but on which values they felt were affected — autonomy, dignity, efficiency, trust — and how these values related to one another. This approach has only been tested once so far, and remains exploratory. Even so, that single session suggested a shift: the conversation moved away from “What did it say?” toward “What did this do?”
This connection between audio and value mapping is still tentative. The role of the hexagon is not yet fixed; it remains a hypothesis rather than a method. In the next iteration of the research, this relationship will be explored further: how listening together, postponing interpretation, and then mapping values might reinforce one another over time.
Alongside these design experiments, I deliberately invested in learning from people for whom audio is not a workaround, but a primary practice.
I conducted an in-depth interview with Rosa Douma and took part in her course. Rosa brings together academic grounding — with a Master’s in Media Studies — and extensive experience as a podcaster and audio maker. Her work ranges from ‘Blokkie Blended‘ at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, to ‘Diepzinnig‘, ‘Dit dus‘ for NPO, and Salima en Roos in Croos in Rotterdam. Speaking with her sharpened my understanding of pacing, voice, intimacy, and responsibility: how audio always positions a listener, whether intentionally or not.
I also attended a class on the technical aspects of audio editing at Willem de Kooning Academy, taught by Leah Howd. With her background in Library and Information Sciences, Leah approaches audio not only as a creative medium but as an information structure. In this class, I learned the basics of audio editing using Reaper, alongside broader principles of audio-visual storytelling for creatives.
In addition, I took an online course on using AI-based voice tools from ElevenLabs, learning how to transform written scripts into spoken audio and — crucially — how to write scripts for listening, rather than for reading. This meant learning to let go of textual density, to work with rhythm, repetition, and pause.
These were not side tracks. They were necessary, incremental steps.
Together, the interview, the courses, and the technical training gave me the practical confidence to use audio deliberately and responsibly in my research. They allowed me to move from experimentation to intention — from “trying audio” to shaping experiences through it.
At Willem de Kooning Academy, where my master research is situated, I now work with audio primarily as a practical means of instruction. It allows people to participate in an experience without relying on reading or writing, and to receive information in real time, together. Audio makes timing, pacing, and sequence explicit, and in doing so shapes how an experience unfolds. Rather than presenting information as something that can be reviewed or corrected later, it asks participants to stay with what is happening in the moment. In that sense, audio supports the kind of lived, shared experience that my research seeks to make possible.
Today, audio is no longer an add-on in my practice. It structures time, redistributes attention, and makes exclusion perceptible rather than theoretical. It supports my broader aim: to shift responsibility away from individuals who “fail” to understand, and toward the systems that insist on being understood in only one way.
If text asks, “Can you read this?”
Audio asks something quieter, but no less demanding:
Are you here, listening, right now?
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