Sound x Design Lab

Acoustic intelligence, from first sketch to lived experience.

We design buildings around what can be seen, measured, and represented. Sound is often considered much later when a space is already built and its problems have become expensive to solve.

Sound x Design Lab explores how sound and other unseen conditions shape our experience of place. Bringing together research, spatial design, and tool-building, the Lab translates complex environmental information into decisions that designers, organizations, and communities can understand and act on.

Our Premise

A sustainable building should support the people inside it—not only through energy and material performance, but through attention, comfort, health, and connection.

Sound can influence how easily we think, rest, communicate, and feel at ease. Yet acoustic design is still largely understood through technical measures such as decibels and reverberation. These matter, but they do not fully describe how a place is experienced.

The Lab asks a broader question: How can we design for what sound does to people, not only for what sound does inside a room?

Soundwell

Soundwell is an applied research project within Sound x Design Lab. It is developing new ways to measure, predict, communicate, and improve the acoustic quality of the built environment.

The project brings together field research, design consultation, post-occupancy learning, and digital tools. At its center is the developing Swiss Sound Method: a human-centered framework connecting acoustic measurement with perception, context, and design action.

Soundwell’s first digital tool is a design-stage platform intended to help teams understand how a space may sound and how that acoustic environment may affect the people using it before it is built. By bringing acoustic insight into early design decisions, it aims to make evidence-based acoustic design more accessible, intuitive, and actionable.