Open Sonifications is a manifesto for a more inclusive approach to data sonification. The practice of turning data into sound is dominated by approaches that prioritise analysis and algorithmic sound synthesis. This pictorial expands the boundaries of what is considered sonification by challenging existing conventions around what we can do with sonification, who gets to use sonification, why we sonify, what counts as valid data or valid sound, and the tools used to make sonifications. Alongside conventional sonification values such as insight and accuracy, we also value raw energy, expressiveness, polyphony, participation, decentralisation, performance, accessibility, approachability, community, and plurality of perspectives. The approaches we describe do not seek to replace established methods, but to enrich them. We contribute a set of values, examples and instructions for joining this movement, and reflections on how people working beyond sonification might benefit from these ideas.

We apply the biological-behavioral concept of an umwelt, which is how an organism perceives and acts within its environment, to the practice of software development. By writing narrative descriptions of our own software umwelts and iteratively discussing and analyzing them, we develop prompts that can elicit reflection on how and why we relate to software in the ways that we do.

Annotations are a critical component of visualizations, helping viewers interpret the visual representation and highlighting critical data insights. Despite their significant role, we lack an understanding of how annotations can be incorporated into other data representations, such as physicalizations and sonifications. Given the emergent nature of these representations, sonifications, and physicalizations lack formalized conventions (e.g., design space, vocabulary) that can introduce challenges for audiences to interpret the intended data encoding. To address this challenge, this work focuses on how annotations can be more tightly integrated into the design process of creating sonifications and physicalizations. In an exploratory study with 13 designers, we explore how visualization annotation techniques can be adapted to sonic and physical modalities. Our work highlights how annotations for sonification and physicalizations are inseparable from their data encodings.

We present a first-person, retrospective exploration of two radio sonification pieces that employ narrative scaffolding to teach audiences how to listen to data. To decelerate and articulate design processes that occurred at the rapid pace of radio production, the sound designer and producer wrote retrospective design accounts. We then revisited the radio pieces through principles drawn from guidance design, data storytelling, visualization literacy, and sound studies. Finally, we speculated how these principles might be applied through interactive, voice-based technologies. First-person methods enabled us to access the implicit knowledge embedded in radio production and translate it to technologies of interest to the human–computer-interaction community, such as voice user interfaces that rely on auditory display. Traditionally, sonification practitioners have focused more on generating sounds than on teaching people how to listen; our process, however, treated sound and narrative as a holistic, sonic-narrative experience. Our first-person retrospection illuminated the role of narrative in designing to support people as they learn to listen to data.

To explore how materials, data, and humans collaborate to produce physical data representations, we created a series of artefacts from personal data we collected (about commuting, forgetting, and busy-ness) in different media---yarn and sound. We exchanged these artefacts without providing guidelines for how to interpret them in order to study where the boundary between maker and interpreter emerges. Through creating hand-crafted physicalizations and sonifications, we present three themes on making personal data narratives: matching data to the materials (and vice versa), accepting the materials' will to co-author, and negotiating between the experience of the data and data of the experience. In exchanging the artefacts, we explored the role of the interpreter as a re-maker and how multiple narratives can productively co-exist. We conclude with a discussion about how reimagining the roles of maker and interpreter might lead to new interactions with personal data narratives.

Music streaming services collect listener data to support personalization and discovery of their extensive catalogs. Yet this data is typically used in ways that are not immediately apparent to listeners. We conducted design workshops with ten Spotify listeners to imagine future voice assistant (VA) interactions leveraging logged music data. We provided participants with detailed personal music listening data, such as play-counts and temporal patterns, which grounded their design ideas in their current behaviors. In the interactions participants designed, VAs did not simply speak their data out loud; instead, participants envisioned how data could implicitly support introspection, behavior change, and exploration. We present reflections on how VAs could evolve from voice-activated remote controls to intelligent music coaches and how personal data can be leveraged as a design resource.

The news landscape has been changing dramatically over the past few years. Whereas news once came from a small set of highly edited sources, now people can find news from thousands of news sites online, through a variety of channels such as web search, social media, email newsletters, or direct browsing. We set out to understand how Americans read news online using web browser logs collected from 174 diverse participants. We found that 20% of all news sessions started with a web search, that 16% started from social media, that 61% of news sessions only involved a single news domain, and that 47% of our participants read news from both sides of the political spectrum. We conclude with key implications for online news, social media, and search sites to encourage more balanced news browsing.