Eleonora Mencarini

Fondazione Bruno Kessler | FBK · Digital Society

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...

Learning outdoor sports entails acquiring physical skills, managing gear, and coordinating with others. We investigated how speleologists are trained to explore underground caves. We interviewed 15 instructors and 10 trainees to understand the main problems that may occur during training cave trips. Our findings show that stressful situations are l...

In this paper, we present a qualitative study on speleology that aims to widen the current understanding of people's practices in Nature and identify a design space for technology that supports such practices. Speleology is a practice based on the discovery, study, and dissemination of natural cavities. Speleologists are amateur experts who often c...

This paper presents a literature review of human–computer interaction works on wearable systems for sports. We selected a corpus of 57 papers and analyzed them through the grounded theory for literature review approach. We identified five themes across the papers: the different research perspectives, the type of sports and sportspeople, the roles o...

We present Paper Pocket Pets, an approach to create personal interactive toys that children can carry along with them. Creating Paper Pocket Pets involves four activities that combine traditional crafts with digital fabrication: paper folding to create a pet; fabrication of the pet's shelter (a platform where the pet lives on); fabrication of the p...

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...

While outdoor sport activities keep gaining popularity as part of a global trend to maintain a healthier lifestyle, current technology offers limited support for activity-specific needs. Therefore, a greater understanding of information sharing behaviours is necessary in order to build comprehensive, socially-embedded sports applications. To this p...

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,...

This paper presents the results of 11 interviews to beginner climbers aimed at investigating the role of emotions in learning climbing. Climbing is an extreme sport becoming increasingly popular thanks to a higher safety and to the spread of indoor gyms. Although the evolution of this sport from alpinism to indoor practice has made it accessible to...

Online social networks have made the sharing of personal experiences with others -- mostly in form of photos and comments -- a common activity. At the same time, an ever increasing number of dedicated sport tracking apps on our smartphones allow us to record statistical and biometric parameters from our workouts and, subsequently, share them with f...

Drawing on concepts from theories on persuasion, social psychology and philosophy of language, we designed an ambient persuasive system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting a balanced flow of communication in group conversational activity. The system includes two main components: a) a context-awareness system that monitors group memb...

In this paper we present the evaluation of an application for the collaborative composition of comics using a pre-defined set of images and sentences. This study is an intermediate step to guide the design of a tablet application for supporting collaborative storytelling between two authors from different cultures and speaking different languages....

In this paper we present an ambient persuasive system designed to promote balanced participation during group brainstorming. The system gets information from participants’ attention behavior during a brainstorming session and provides visual messages for facilitating balanced participation. In the present study, we investigated the effect that usin...

In this paper, we present the evaluation of a pen-and-paper mockup for the composition of comics using a pre-defined set of images and sentences. Our goal was to investigate the effectiveness and the satisfaction of use of such an approach in comparison to a less constrained one. This pilot study is meant as an initial step to inform the design of...

In this paper, we present a system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting the flow of communication in a group conversation activity. The system monitors the group members' non-verbal behavior and promotes balanced participation, giving targeted directives to the participants through peripheral displays. We describe an initial study to...

In this paper we describe a public display system that detects the users' interest and adapts the on-screen content accordingly. An interest estimation algorithm based on the analysis of the users' non-verbal behaviour, including the users' position, their orientation and the social context, is proposed. A preliminary field study suggests that an a...

A field study on the dynamics of acceptance and rejection of public displays in a knowledge work environment is presented. This study has been conducted on the premises of a research center that employs more than 400 people. We report the motivations for the deployment of a public display infrastructure by the Communication Office, and present the...

In this paper, we describe the artifacts and the practices that a group of elderly people use to plan future events and remembering information about future event at the proper time. The role of such artifacts in the construction of a narrative and emotional account of elderly life is discussed. A particular attention is given to the description of...