Valentina Nisi

University of Lisbon | UL · Instituto Superior Técnico

In 2020, Europe announced the New European Bauhaus (NEB). While the initiative intends to achieve EU sustainability goals, framing it under the name of the Bauhaus brings various challenges and issues to the fore. In this article, we analyze the critiques of the original Bauhaus and the NEB to understand the challenges that the NEB lighthouse proje...

As hackathons go mainstream, they face an increasing and partly controversial appropriation that calls for critical examination. Born as software development events within the open-source community, hackathons consistently became the feeding grounds of private companies and venture capitalists looking for new talent and products. In this context, w...

This paper introduces “hackeanos”―portmanteau of “hacking” and “Okeanos”, an innovative collaborative event format aimed at fostering tech-inspired blue citizenship. In hackeanos participants are invited to appropriate technologies in order to decode and reconfigure their relationship with the Ocean―understood as a single interconnected planetary e...

Heritage is a dynamic concept, being constantly redefined by those that value it. Modern approaches to heritage bring focus to participatory processes that put communities at the centre of the heritage discourse. For migrant communities, these participatory processes can show the tension of integration versus identity, as migrants integrating into...

Children’s interest in new technologies and games creates opportunities to use these tools to facilitate their thinking processes for scientific content and education, especially to support abstract reasoning in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM). Chemistry concepts, in particular, can benefit from being presented through h...

As the concept of the Metaverse becomes a reality, storytelling tools sharpen their teeth to include Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality as prominent enabling features. While digitally savvy and privileged populations are well-positioned to use technology, marginalized groups risk being left behind and excluded from societal progress, dee...

Current cultural policies are evolving from social inclusion (removing barriers and promoting equality for participation in culture) to social cohesion (fostering solid bonds between groups despite their differences). Digital interventions can create spaces that promote social inclusion and cohesion. In this paper, we report on the design and evalu...

Economic activities are built on several essential factors such as capital, technology, and notably, labour. Despite extensive exploration of economic activities in the last decade, prior design research has overlooked the impact of Design on Labour. Designers play crucial roles as creators of gig platforms, yet research on the intersection between...

Transitioning to and through University is a delicate period for students’ well-being. Moreover, the recent COVID-19 pandemic added a further toll through the various challenges related to studying, socializing, community-building, and safety. These challenges inspired the design of a mobile application, called Tecnico GO!, to support university st...

The gig economy and digital labor platforms, such as food delivery, have become essential while also troubling the current socioeconomic landscape. Delivery platforms promise entry-level work, flexibility, and other benefits. However, researchers remain divided on if these platforms benefit workers and society at large. This study aims to shed ligh...

This white paper was written by the members of the Work Group focusing on design practices of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR, WG1). It presents an overview of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) design for complexity representations through IDN workflows and methodologies, IDN authoring...

This white paper was written by the members of the Work Group focusing on design practices of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR, WG1). It presents an overview of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) design for complexity representations through IDN workflows and methodologies, IDN authoring...

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...

Web-immersion – i.e., a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption engendered by the content and interactive features of a website - plays an important role in our modern, digital world. Yet, this topic has received little attention from design and HCI scholars. The lack of tools to assess and measure immersion in the Web may severely limit...

This pictorial presents Periodic Fable (PF), an educational game’s design and graphic interface that promotes a constructivist approach to engage young children with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects. The game presents children with scientific content supported with an exploratory activity using physical cubes manipulable t...

While museums are designed to engage and interest various audiences, teenagers are often a neglected segment. Without digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain exciting and relevant to a young, tech-savvy audience. Games can benefit museums by fostering positive attitudes towards museum spaces and creating more joyful destinat...

Digital Storytelling can exploit numerous technologies and sources of information to support the creation, refinement and enhancement of a narrative. Research on text editing tools has created novel interactions that support authors in different stages of the creative process, such as the inclusion of crowd-generated content for writing. While thes...

This paper is about improving children’s learning of biodiversity and preservation of the environment through interactive storytelling and gaming. We conducted a user study with a between-subjects design with eighty-three children aged 6 to 10 years from the South of Brazil. We analysed the role of the agent’s embodiment (embodied vs not embodied),...

The emergence of a networked society generates transformations in the dynamic interactions of people impacting cultural and service systems. A location can provide different individual and collective meanings, perceptions, and experiences to different people. However, it is unclear how urban actors can collect, measure, and operationalise such plac...

Climate change is arguably the most urgent issue of our time, demanding the participation of all types of stakeholders, from individuals to governments. However, climate change communication has been focused on negative framings based on the mere presentation of data, in many cases demotivating or simply not helping in action. This Ph.D. proposes u...

This pictorial presents the concept and preliminary design of “Tecnico Go!”, an application conceived to support college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project applied HCI and user-centred design methods to understand students’ needs, pains, and desires during the pandemic period. The authors collected, unpacked, and reflected on user-c...

Climate change is arguably the most urgent crisis of our lifetimes, and the Design community has been continuously exploring how to respond to this complex challenge. However, the past few years have demonstrated just how difficult climate change communication and engagement can be. As a response to the Anthropocene challenges, HCI and Design resea...

Life-supporting ecosystems are facing impending destruction. The human–computer interaction (HCI) community must rethink how to design technological interventions that reconcile concepts and theories for ecological computing. Proponents of sustainable HCI have pushed for tools and systems that aim to decenter the human in a shift toward posthuman d...

COVID-19 gave rise to discussions around designing for life during the pandemic, in particular related to health, leisure and education. In 2020, an online survey aimed at university students (N=225) pointed the authors to various challenges related to well-being in terms of studying, socializing, community, and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic....

While museums are often designed to engage and interest a wide variety of audiences, teenagers are a neglected segment. This article describes a set of findings that aids in designing enjoyable interactive experiences inside natural history museums for teenagers (15–19 years old). For this research, 223 teenagers have been involved through co-desig...

Sharing economy and contemporary tourism are two emerging concepts that urge to be investigated together with new ubiquitous and immersive technologies, in the tourism and hospitality sector. In this rich scenario, we designed and implemented ShareCities, a platform to foster remote direct information exchange and meaningful interactions among tour...

In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of large-scale human mobility patterns obtained from a passive Wi-Fi tracking system, deployed across different location typologies. We have deployed a system to cover urban areas served by public transportation systems as well as very isolated and rural areas. Over 4 years, we collected 572 million d...

Sustainable Development (SD) in its dimensions – environment, economy, and society – is a growing area of concern within the HCI community. This paper advances a systematic literature review on sustainability across the Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI) body of work. The papers were classified according to the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) f...

We present a case study to understand how migrant communities embrace and connect with their host city’s cultural heritage. To achieve this, we deployed a study with ten adult migrants (first- and second-generation Lisbon dwellers) articulated into two stages: (i) a five-day photo-challenge involving storytelling elucidated by pictures and short te...

Teenagers are an understudied group within the Interaction Design and Children community. Museums and cultural heritage spaces offer solutions for young children but none that are specifically targeted to teenagers. The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. This paper c...

Climate change is arguably one of the most debated issues today. The scale and global reach of this crisis doesn’t afford a universal solution and requires widespread global mobilization. Public engagement is essential for the success of any initiative on this topic. However, sometimes communicating the facts is not enough. Interactive storytelling...

Background: The global health crisis caused by COVID-19 has drastically changed human society in a relatively short time. However, this crisis has offered insights into the different roles that such world wide virus plays in the lives of people, and how those have been affected, and eventually propose new solutions. Objective: From the beginning...

Transmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visito...

The use of Conversational Interfaces has evolved rapidly in numerous fields; in particular, they are an interesting tool for Serious Games to leverage on. Conversational Interfaces can assist Serious Games’ goals, namely in presenting knowledge through dialogue. With the global acknowledgment of the joint crisis in nature and climate change, it is...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing measures were employed to contain its spread. This paper describes the deployment and testing of a passive Wi-Fi scanning system to help people keep track of crowded spaces, hence comply with social distancing measures. The system is based on passive Wi-Fi sensing to detect human presence in 93 locati...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing measures were employed to contain its spread. This paper describes the deployment and testing of a passive Wi-Fi scanning system to help people keep track of crowded spaces, hence comply with social distancing measures. The system is based on passive Wi-Fi sensing to detect human presence in 93 locati...

The current pandemic situation leads researchers to reflect on conducting qualitative research, completely changing how they conduct participatory research. As it became clear that the pandemic would last many months, researchers started to redesign their planned research in digital spaces through social media channels and participatory online tool...

Augmented Reality (AR) applications have the potential to improve students’ Chemistry learning performance. By identifying the unique features and affordances of this technology, we can design more effective tools to facilitate the learning process of abstract concepts. We developed Periodic Fable in the Wild, an AR serious game as an instrument to...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal call to action addressed not only to governments but also to businesses and civil society. In this scenario, Universities play a key role in achieving the SDGs and, also, in creating awareness about these global issues. As an example, the University of Bologna is carrying out several initiati...

Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries fundamentally arising from mobility as a form of capital. In destination islands that have a delicate ecosystem to maintain, this source of income can become problematic in terms of sustainability. A difficulty in making people aware of this issue is also represented by the fact that such sustainabil...

Introduction: New approaches to the study of the binge-watching phenomenon require new technology, leading to the development of a non-intrusive and low-cost analytical research software that facilitates a holistic under- standing of binge-watching in an uncontrolled environment remotely (e.g., the home). BWDAT was developed to allow the collection...

The growth of Internet-distributed TV services has transformed video consumption, enhancing the level of control that viewers have over what they watch. Along with the release of entire seasons of programming at once, this has led to the phenomenon of ‘binge-watching’, in which several episodes of a program are viewed in one sitting. This article p...

As climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening the natural world’s equilibrium and survival, people’s concerns about these topics have increased significantly. The work presented in this paper lies at the cross-section between the areas of education, biodiversity and technologies. More specifically, this project builds on research in virtu...

Immersive technologies aligned with storytelling can create novel and powerful tools to inform and ponder on social issues. This demo paper describes a cinematic virtual reality project, Tell a Tail 360\(^{\circ }\), on the rescue of abandoned companion animals. Tell a Tail 360\(^{\circ }\) was designed targeting teens (13–19 years old) and its inc...

Storytelling is a fundamental component of a child’s early development stages, informing their world view and promoting self-growth. Comic books are a common medium in these development stages, for their power of communication and expression. Inspired by narrative branching structures and technological advances in Augmented Reality (AR), we develop...

Teenagers are a large pool of potential museum audiences. This age group is identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum’s curatorial strategies [1] and appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer [2]. Without some degree of digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain interesting and...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of VR Open Scores: aleatoric score-based virtual scenarios where an aleatoric score is embedded in a virtual environment. This idea builds upon the notion of graphic scores and composed instrument , and apply them in a new context. Our proposal also explores possible parallels between open meaning in interact...

In this paper, we present a real-world study where a community-based tracking infrastructure has been put to good use for understanding human mobility during the COVID-19 outbreak, in order to contrast its diffusion. In particular, the infrastructure, deployed in 81 points of interests (POIs) across the Madeira Islands (Portugal), can collect a mas...

The twin crises of nature and climate is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence and increasing public concern about long-term and potentially irreversible consequences of the Anthropocene. People and wildlife living today, as well as future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and othe...

Playful interactions and storytelling become a powerful conduit for educational-entertainment experiences aimed at informing and critiquing social issues. In this paper, we describe the design of a transmedia experience, which uses its separate channels to deconstruct a complex social issue, while maintaining a coordinated and consistent story expe...

The popularity of internet-distributed TV entertainment services, such as Netflix, has transformed TV consumption behavior. Currently, the level of control viewers have over their TV experiences, along with the release of complete seasons at once, are some of the factors that stimulate the so-called binge-watching phenomenon (the consumption of sev...

Chemistry is often regarded as a complex and demanding subject for youth to learn, partly because of abstract concepts that are challenging to depict. These areas require spatial reasoning, defined as the ability to retain, generate and manipulate abstract visual images in space, either physically or mentally. By allowing the superimposition of vir...

Whale watching is a prime example of ecotourism services reaching millions of people worldwide. In this paper, we describe a prototype of a mobile application designed to enhance the whale watching experience. Integrating eco-acoustics and entertainment components, the authors designed an App that enhances customer satisfaction even in the case of...