As a doctoral student at McGill University, I was offered the opportunity to intern anywhere I chose. McGill would support me and the internship site would receive the benefits of my skills. When considering the possibilities in front of me, I leapt at the opportunity to work with the amazing folks in the K12 Lab at the d.school at Stanford University. My first design challenge thus became that of giving structure to what I would actually do for the internship itself…

I wanted to take advantage of my skills as a recording artist and podcast producer. I love sound and audio as a medium for learning and sought more opportunities to create at the intersections of the recording arts and design. I also knew, though, that I wanted to root anything I would do in the values of social justice…

But I also wanted to explore what asynchronous, remote learning might look like — or rather, sound like — without screens. What might it mean, I wondered, to free listeners from a desk/computer and invite them to move/walk/explore with the guidance of a facilitator of learning. With these things in mind — a proclivity towards audio as a screen-free medium and a focus on social justice-oriented work — we set forth to produce what would become Sound Practice.

As an educator with a breadth of experience working with students facing learning disabilities and other obstacles to engagement, I worked to infuse the principals of Universal Design for Learning into the exercises. To do so, I made them so they required very few resources and structured them as a series of tracks on a music album might be. Each track would provide instructions for each step in an exercise as well as space for the user to complete a given task. In this way, listeners could work at their own pace.

To begin, I started with a name, something that could act as a placeholder while we worked towards a more appropriate brand. I have always been drawn to the idea of names that seem detached from the content of an organization, company or product — Uber, tiktok, Spotify for example — and was drawn to the word ‘abacus’ for a few reasons. Not only was ‘abacus’ not in use as a podcast or in most other audio formats, but it also meant “the act of drawing in the sand” in its original definition. Later, Eastern cultures referred to a pre-industrial calculator as an abacus. With these definitions in mind, drawing in the sand and keeping track of things numerically, I felt ‘abacus’ could be a solid stand-in until we found something more suitable. I designed the below graphic as a result.

After our design process had begun, we recognized the need for a potential alternative. sam seidel, the Director of K12 Strategy and Research in the K12 Lab in the d.school at Stanford, identified the audio nature of our work and the need to identify equity work as an ongoing practice. We landed on Sound Practice as a potential alternative. Logo drafts for each are below.

As you can see, the original logo for The Abacus influenced subsequent logos for Sound Practice in style, font, colorway and layout. Once we moved towards Sound Practice as a name, I began including allusions to social justice movements and sound as represented by megaphones, headphones and soundwaves.

Before we could confidently settle on a name and a logo, though, we needed to solicit user feedback. With this in mind and drafts of three prototypes in hand, I put together user feedback surveys for each prototype. Between myself and the rest of the Sound Practice team, we refined the questions so as to solicit the most prudent feedback possible and sent the opportunity to participate in our user experience research process out to the 6,000 recipients of the d.school’s weekly newsletter. Ultimately, we wanted to know where these tools fell along the spectra of useful/useless, confusing/straightforward, enjoyable/cringeworthy, and how long each exercise took for various users. Below is just one answer to one question from one of the three surveys we conducted on our prototypes.

The results of our surveys revealed a few important insights. First, that users preferred Sound Practice as a name. Second, that users needed more background information on each exercise. This led us to record and produce informational podcast episodes to accompany each exercise. We structured these episodes as conversations between myself as the host and executive producer and the creators of the original exercises from which the audio versions were produced. We also heard that the self-paced nature of the exercises worked well for our users. They enjoyed being able to linger on a given part of an exercise and choose when to move on by themselves. We also received helpful recommendations for how to name, brand and structure some exercises. The result of this process is a series of audio exercises that have since been taken up by educators and designers across the US and Canada. Please find these exercises and the accompanying podcast series below.