Marisol Wong-Villacres

Georgia Institute of Technology | GT · School of Interactive Computing

Parents' engagement in their children's education is key to chil-dren's academic success and social development. For many parents in the U.S., engagement is still a struggle partly due to a lack of communication and community-building tools that support the broader ecology of parenting, or parental ecology. Although current technologies have the po...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a low-cost portable tabletop to be used in classrooms. This solution enables pen and touch interactions over a projected canvas. Twelve users participated in a user study that gauged the system’s effectiveness to support drawing and moving objects on the surface. Additionally, a stress test to e...

This study validates the potential of a tabletop system to enhance students' quality and intensity of argumentation when engaging in co-located collaborative design activities. Twenty-four undergraduate students participated in a between-subjects design where one group used the proposed system and the other group used a paper-based approach. Overal...

This study explores the role technology plays in supporting long-distance relationships of migrant parents and left-behind children in developing countries such as Ecuador, in order to inform the design of technology that better suits their affective needs and their context's constraints. We derived three design principles based on our fieldwork in...

Despite the increase in university courses and curricula on the ethics of computing there are few studies about how CS programs should account for the diverse ways ethical dilemmas and approaches to ethics are situated in cultural, philosophical and governance systems, religions and languages. We draw on the experiences and insights of 46 universit...

In this paper, we present a performative exercise aimed at revisiting, from Latin American “Southern” perspectives, two seminal articles in Participatory Design (PD): “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design” by Sanders & Stappers, and “Participation in Design Things” by Ehn. The goal is to turn peer review into a critical tool to inform estab...

The field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has long recognized a socio-technical gap complicating the design of technologies that can sustainably meet social needs. In response, a growing body of research advocates for assets-based design, an approach that seeks to build upon what the individuals and community already have. The emphasi...

Over the last 20 years, the Latin American Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has been working to shed light on how the diverse populations in the region are adopting, using, and making sense of computational technologies. Latin America's tense socio-political context, plurality of languages , collectivist culture, and historical relationsh...

In this paper, we examine the information work that bilingual parent-education liaisons perform to create connections towards assisting immigrant parents in the United States. As part of formal and informal educational institutions, liaisons operate between different social worlds---within and beyond the domain of education---to maximize immigrant...

Research in the fields of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is increasingly embracing and moving across borders. While universalism in such research is widely rejected, sole focus on the "particular'' is also commonly critiqued. Kentaro Toyama unpacks this tension, calling for balance via "deliberate ef...

We examined the integration of VR into informal and less-structured learning environments in Atlanta (USA) and Mumbai (India) through a process of co-design, co-creation, and co-learning with students and teachers where students learned to use VR to engage with their economic, social, and cultural realities. Using qualitative methods, we engaged st...

The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has shown a growing interest in how technology might support parenting. An area that remains underexplored is the design of technology to support parents from nondominant groups in positively impacting their children's education. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), our paper takes a sociotechnical vi...

The HCI Across Borders (HCIxB) community has been growing in recent years, thanks in particular to the Development Consortium at CHI 2016 and the HCIxB Symposia at CHI 2017 and 2018. This year, we propose an HCIxB symposium that continues to build scholarship potential of early career HCIxB researchers, strengthening ties between more and less expe...

This consolidation of 18 stories from students and researchers of human-centered computing (HCC) represent some of the diverse shades of feminism that are present in our field. These stories, our stories, reflect how we see the world and why, also articulating the change we wish to bring.

We present a case for aspirations-based design by drawing on a qualitative inquiry into the lives of young girls in rural West Bengal (India). These girls form a particularly vulnerable population, coming from an area known to be susceptible to sex trafficking and crimes against women. We leverage our findings to engage with Kentaro Toyama's call f...

Parents' participation and actual engagement in their children's education is one of the most important predictors of children's academic success. However, inequities in information access prevent many parents in the United States from engaging in ways that allow their children to achieve such success. We present preliminary research that holistica...

There is a growing community within CSCW that examines issues of equity and inclusion in internet and social media use. With researchers focused on global development, social justice, accessibility, and more, we contend that there are issues of equity and inclusion impacting the research subjects located on the "margins" of digital existence, the r...

In response to the recent call for a more intersectionally-aware field of human-computer interaction (HCI), we aim to operationalize intersectionality for technology design in HCI. We develop our lens of intersectionality by drawing on the work of Rita Kaur Dhamoon, and use it to analyze data collected from a multi-sited ethnographic study of seven...

Since 2014, Venezuela has experienced severe economic crisis, including scarcity of basic necessities such as food and medicine. This has resulted in over-priced goods, scams, and other forms of economic abuse. We present an investigation of Venezuelans' efforts to form an alternative, Solidarity Economy (SE) through Facebook Groups. In these group...

When a 7.8 intensity earthquake caused widespread disaster in Ecuador on April 16, 2016, citizens across the country self-organized to gather, mobilize, and distribute supplies to affected populations, assuming the role of ad hoc humanitarian logisticians. Drawing on ethnographic findings, we present a situated perspective of how these citizens str...

Parents’engagementintheirchildren’seducationiskeytochildren’s academic success and social development. For many parents in the U.S., engagement is still a struggle partly due to a lack of communication and community-building tools that support the broader ecology of parenting, or parental ecology. Although current technologies have the potential to...

This study explores the impact of a tabletop-generated feedback on student’s collaborative skills over time. Twenty-one Computer Science students participated in a threeweek experimentation. A two-group design was used to assess three dimensions of collaboration: contributions, communication and respect. While the experimental group was asked to so...

This study explores the design of a tabletop system that seeks to bolster the argumentative skills of Computer Science students. A set of four design guidelines - positive interdependence, stages, interference, and awareness - were derived from user research and used for designing and prototyping a multi-display tabletop application. Four students...

The present study describes a proposed multi-tabletop system for supporting collaborative database design activities in the classroom. Additionally, two experiments were conducted to evaluate students' and teachers' perceptions of the proposed system potential on aspects of group work assessment such as: ease of grading individuals as well as group...