Potential of Application of Psychoacoustics to User/Product Interaction Design

Product design helps people to access to technological devices through the development of a product interface. It is also capable of influencing people's interaction with others and with the environment, and of affecting the emotional response of product users, as the evolution of this activity to a new approach that can be defined as product semantics design. Thus, the product itself is a communicative system, and an understanding of it depends on the congruence of the sensorial properties perceived by the user with the concept of the product. Therefore, given that sound is one of the essential stimuli perceived by users, it is also one of the vital parameters to be configured by the designer, and the knowledge of the communicative capacities of sounds and their properties must be incorporated into the product design process. This paper reviews some of the more relevant studies in the field of sound from a perspective of its potential application to product interaction design, and critically analyses their main contributions to date and their potential application in order to contribute to the proposal for future lines of work.