Since its introduction to the New Futures squad (a future-driven subsection of Industrial Design at TU/e), the IoT Sandbox has been a crucial tool for generating insights into the near future. It is a central meeting point – both physically and conceptually – for orientation, ideation, and evaluation in student projects. As an ‘arena for design’ it promotes collaboration as well as competition between groups, both resulting in more contextually relevant designs and more meaningful connections between IoT concepts.

However, the IoT Sandbox does pose some limitations. Designers are forced into a bird’s eye view, and are therefore unable to get a realistic, first-person perspective on the effects that their design solutions have in the space. The absence of sound capabilities makes this issue extra limiting for groups who actively work with sound in their concepts. This design research explores how a generative first-person soundscape, integrated into a physical IoT Sandbox, can assist in collaborative contextualization between design groups. How can sound play a role in shaping the future?