Chiara Leonardi

• Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Addressing sustainable development challenges in rural areas requires innovative solutions that effectively engage diverse stakeholders in collaborative co-design processes. This paper presents the development of a gamified phygital (physical and digital) co-design tool designed to foster active participation, enhance motivation, and enable the col...

This paper investigates the challenges of designing a computer supported collaborative environment aimed at facilitating co-production processes, i.e., those collaborative processes between Public Administrations, private stakeholders and citizens that aim at the design of public services, their implementation, and their shared delivery to the comm...

Campaigns in Citizen Science (CS) experiments are co-production processes where a wide range of diverse stakeholders must be coordinated to achieve a common societal or environmental purpose, i.e., generate evidence for the validation of a hypothesis. This work describes a Collaborative Environment (CE) to aid the co-design and co-delivery of CS ca...

As the climate crisis is turning into one of the most critical issues of our time, HCI researchers keep reflecting on the role their work can play in reducing the impact of adverse environmental changes. Suggestions have been made to expand Sustainable HCI (SHCI)'s intervention area to policy design to have a larger impact, consider non-human actor...

This paper describes a digital tool to foster sustainable engagement of stakeholders in collaborative processes, namely Collaborative Environment. A distinguishing aspect of the tool is its co-production model-based project management and its emphasis on reusability. The paper also reasons on how this tool should be effectively complemented to real...

Purpose The European H2020 Families_Share project aims at offering a grass-root approach and a co-designed platform supporting families for sharing time and tasks related to childcare, parenting, after-school and leisure activities and other household tasks. To achieve this objective, the Families_Share project has been built on current practices w...

New forms of socializing care that leverage community networks and are based on alternative social arrangements are being experimented with in different grassroots contexts. They are being framed as innovative practices to facilitate the integration of professional and caring responsibilities. In this changing landscape, the private sector might be...

IMPACT When designing technology to support the co-production of a public service, focusing on the functional role alone will limit the value of the exercise. This paper describes the design requirements of a digital platform for the co-creation of childcare in two different communities—a neighbourhood and a private organization. The paper will hav...

Child independent mobility (CIM) refers to the freedom and capability of children to move about their local neighborhoods without constant direct adult supervision. Our climb project combats an observed decline in CIM, offering a pervasive gameful platform for home–school mobility composed of three primary components: the first two using technology...

Technology increasingly offers parents more and more opportunities to monitor children, reshaping the way control and autonomy are negotiated within families. This paper investigates the views of parents and primary school children on mobile technology designed to support child independent mobility in the context of the local walking school buses....

This paper presents the co-design process of a wearable device for rock climbing, an extreme sport that requires high physical, emotional, and cognitive involvement. From the preliminary investigation of climbers’ needs, it emerged that their acceptance of wearables is mainly influenced by climbing sport-specific values like self-efficacy, trust, a...

Crowdsourcing for addressing environmental challenges is a promising area in HCI research. This work investigates participation in a crowdsourcing initiative that combined a social-purpose activity with the interest of a company to crowdsource a labour-intensive task. The initiative was based on the deployment of a mobile application for pro-enviro...

The wide adoption of mobile devices and social media platforms have dramatically increased the collection and sharing of personal information. More and more frequently, users are called to take decisions concerning the disclosure of their personal information. In this study, we investigate the factors affecting users' choices toward the disclosure...

The wide adoption of mobile devices and social media platforms have dramatically increased the collection and sharing of personal information. More and more frequently, users are called to take decisions concerning the disclosure of their personal information. In this study, we investigate the factors affecting users' choices toward the disclosure...

In this paper, we present a field study on the learning of climbing aimed at defining the design space of wearable devices to support beginners. Three main findings have emerged from our study. First, climbing has a strong emotional impact on beginners; therefore, learning to climb requires mastering new motor patterns as well as negative emotions,...

The exploration of people’s everyday life has long been of interest to social scientists. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by technology (e.g. mobile phones). To date, a few large-scale studies have been designed to measure human behaviors and interactions using multiple sources of data. A...

A diary approach was used to explore location-sharing preferences of 126 parents with young children with the goal of investigating which elements play a role in their decision to share their location. During a 3-week user study, we daily collected parents’ preferences of location sharing along with data related to the physical and social context,...

In this paper, we present an explorative study aimed at assessing challenges and opportunities for the design of innovative technologies to support the exchange of goods and services in geographically local contexts. A preliminary focus group identified the main dimensions and issues informing the design of a survey, which was submitted to parents...

This paper presents an assessment of the experience with a Living Lab project which is currently involving 128 families with young children in a long-term relation to design mobile services for this user group. Living Labs are a promising way to manage innovation yet they also pose several challenges to retain participants and to keep their motivat...

In this paper, we present SecondNose, an air quality mobile crowdsensing service, aimed at collecting environmental data to monitor some air pollution indicators to foster participants' reflection on their overall exposure to pollutants. Currently, SecondNose aggregates more than 30k data points daily from 80 citizens in Trento, northern Italy. The...

The increasing adoption of smartphones and their capability of collecting personal and contextual information have generated a tremendous increment in the production of (personal) data. The availability of such a huge amount of data represents an invaluable opportunity for organizations and individuals to enable new application scenarios. However,...

In this paper, we present a preliminary investigation toward the design of mobile services aiming at supporting offline networking among parents with young children. In particular, we investigated the attitude toward mobile services exploiting location sharing to promote offline social gatherings. We made in-depth interviews with nine working paren...

The centrality of users in the design and development of complex systems calls for new methodologies and techniques to identify and represent user needs and to translate them into real processes. This work proposes a methodological approach for the development of automated user-intensive Ambient Intelligence systems. The novelty is that the methodo...

In the NETCARITY project, we conducted several complementary investigation activities with elderly people revolving around the design of technology for the home environment. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of virtual characters in making the interaction with the technology-enhanced home more effective and engaging. We briefly dis...

This study aims at defining and evaluating new monitoring-based services where telecare and smart home approaches are combined to support the well-being of the aging population. The evaluation was carried out by means of envisioning scenarios discussed with older adults and telecare operators. The basic assumption of the envisaged service was to in...

An initial investigation on the use of "encrypted" public displays as a way of interfacing an ambient intelligent infrastructure in dementia care centers is presented. Ambient intelligence promises new opportunities for daily human life that will be simplified by making people's environments supportive, flexible and adaptive. Yet, a crucial aspect...

In the design of information technologies, the challenge of integrating a human-centered design approach with software engineering methods emerge in different forms. The main challenge is to set the ground for different disciplines and professional cultures communicate and work together. The orchestration of different contributions and the establis...

Goal-oriented requirements engineering aims at eliciting, elab- orating, structuring, specifying, analyzing and documenting functional and non-functional requirements. This activity must include the involve- ment of final users of the system across the whole process to reduce the risk of misunderstanding the domain, missing important details and to...

This paper presents the design ideas and a preliminary study of a touch-based gestural interface to support older adults in social networking. We had the hypothesis that the directness of gestures made them well suited to implement an interaction metaphor based on familiarity. Although preliminary, this hypothesis can be sustained. In particular, w...

In this paper, we present our experience in using narrative scenarios as a tool to communicate and validate semi-formal requirements with the stakeholders in a large software project. The process of translating the semi-formal language of Tropos into the narrative form of scenarios is introduced and some unintended implications of this process are...

The centrality of users in the design and development of complex systems, such as service-based applications, calls for new methodologies and techniques to extract and represent user needs and to translate them into real processes. In this short paper, we describe the integration of concepts and analysis techniques of different approaches, namely G...

This paper presents an approach to explore the coupling of User-Centred Design and Tropos methodologies. The two methodologies have been employed in a real project aiming at developing smart environment for nursing home to support medical and assistance staff. In particular Tropos has been used for modeling (and reason about) the domain and the sys...

Taking inspirations from a number of case studies and experiences, we herein propose and discuss five challenges related to users' participation in the design and development of assistive technologies for elderly people. We believe that it is important to extend participation in care-related Participatory Design (PD) processes to both include elder...

The domestic environment is more than a place where to live. It is a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and aesthetics are deeply interwoven with the functional and utilitarian dimensions. With the aging process, the home is progressively invested with new meanings and functions, and becomes the emotional center of older people's...

This paper proposes a new challenge for the Future Internet initiatives: the need of bridging the digital divide that, even in Europe, still hampers the access to the internet for a large part of the population. As a case study, we discuss the design of communication services for elderly people in northern Italy. The process was conducted by a mult...

The domestic environment is more than a place where to live. It is a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and aesthetics are deeply interwoven with the functional and utilitarian dimensions. With the aging process, the home is progressively invested with new meanings and functions, and becomes the emotional center of older people's...

In this chapter, we describe the design and development of co-located multi user collaborative displays that aim to support effective social interactions within a small group of professionals engaged in meeting activities. Several studies have investigated and tried to go beyond the design paradigm developed for single-user/singledesktop interactio...

This paper discusses some general results from an in-situ study of the use of a tabletop system for card playing that differs in several ways from most tabletop systems: 1. It was designed primarily for use by senior citizens with little or no computer experience. 2. It is a single-user system, though social interaction with nearby persons during i...

This paper proposes an investigation protocol for research and development of Ambient Assisted Living technologies for elderly people, based on effective strategies for motivating users and establishing a long-term relationship that enables them to "enter in the User Centered Design loop". For a project that aims at the experimentation in the users...

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it pos- sible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the...

In this paper, we present a preliminary field study aimed at investigating collaborative work activities supported by a horizontal interface. We analyzed the use of system by focusing on activities distribution and on coordination dynamics during actual meetings. The results have implications for the understanding of social dynamics occurring when...

In this paper, we present an implementation and an initial evaluation of a tabletop device to support small group meetings. This work is part of a larger project, called CHIL, funded by the European Commission to study multimodal support to human-human group activities. In designing our application, we pursued a strict User-Centered Design approach...

In this paper, we introduce a coding scheme aimed at annotating group behaviour. The scheme is inspired by the Bales' Interaction Process Analysis and consists in 10 labels organized in 2 dimensions. After the description the categories some preliminary results concerning its reliability are presented.

This paper describes an initial evaluative study of a tabletop device to support small groups meetings in face-to- face interactions. The research goal was to investigate the appropriation processes focusing particularly on un expected uses of the system and on interaction styles adopted by groups. We outline how patterns of adoption/adaptation can...

The use of co-located interfaces can be more probl ematic than work- ing on standard single-user software because people have to deal simultane- ously with the dynamics of group behaviour and with the hassles of the (wrong) design. In this position paper, we report the some preliminary result of a quali- tative study conducted on 10 small groups us...