Vanessa De Luca

In this paper, we introduce Social Power Game, a mobile game application that aims at encouraging energy saving through social interaction. Instead of an individual energy analytic approach, this game incorporates social interaction and gamification as crucial principles for curbing energy consumption, fostering community collaboration and increasi...

This article invites reflections on the design fieldwork practice as a process for connecting, relating and understanding complex social, natural, cultural and political systems, non-linear and interdependent visions about change at the root of many ecological issues. Through walking and talking with natural scientists in Madeira Island, we conduct...

There is an unprecedented demand for re-imaging natural science and design to best address and involve the ecological, material, technical and evolutional dimensions of cultural life. The collaborative advocacy for an ecological mindset on a large scale is central in implementing innovative and multi-perspective approaches to sustainability. The co...

The role of citizens in the conservation of a territory is fundamental, not only for the implementation of individual actions, but also for their contribution in inviting and supporting the necessary socio-political-cultural changes. We recorded the voices and points of view of experts who study specific aspects concerning the natural environment o...

In previous research, our team developed an app-based energy-savings challenge, called Social Power, that allowed households to monitor their electricity consumption in real time through a gamified, lay-person visualisation, which connected actions to energy use without the need for a more complex understanding of the energy system. Households wer...

While various approaches are shown to be effective in reducing electricity use of end consumers during an intervention, few studies continue to track participants to evaluate whether these effects last and whether the same factors are still impactful in the long term. The present paper describes results one year after a behavior change intervention...

To test the effectiveness of a competitive or collaborative approach on engaging people to change their household electricity-use habits, a mobile app, called Social Power, is developed to provide electricity meter feedback in two gamified environments. The project aims at stimulating social engagement and promoting behavioral change to save electr...

Our environment evolves in relation to changes in lifestyle, consumption and production behaviors, and with the evolution in communication and interaction interfaces. Interactive technologies play an important part in this change working as personal devices, social and communication platforms, and also as networked sensors systems. Among the main e...

How to regulate emotions in stressful situations has become an important skill that professionals routinely need to deal with, especially for classical musicians, theatre actors and performers when moving from backstage to the stage and from the learning environment to the professional one. Conservatories and art schools have recently begun to intr...

The emerging era of cloud services has already started and the concepts of Internet of Things (IoT) are ready to be introduced in the modern everyday life through the deployment of a large scope of novel applications. In this paper we present the concepts and ideas of the INLIFE project. The software produced by using the INLIFE platform can be see...

During the last 10 years, gamification has received increasing attention targeting a variety of people including children, students, youngsters and employers. In addition, great progress has been also observed in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) triggering various researchers' interest. In this paper, we present the core integration architecture and a...

L'ambiente evolve in relazione al cambiamento degli stili di vita, ai comportamenti di consumo e produzione ma anche alle modalità di comunicazione e di interazione. Le tecno-logie partecipano in questo ampio processo come dispo-sitivi personali, come piattaforme sociali e comunicative ma anche come network di sensori. Tra le macro-tendenze emergon...

Active play seems to help build understanding across concrete reality and abstract things. It taps into the world of “fun”, affects emotions and have the ability to involve users more deeply. At the same time, it has the potential to motivate behaviours and rises the awareness on how real systems works. This process moves several questions about: t...

Social Power is a Swiss research project. It develops and tests an innovative game application for smartphones and tablets with the intention to raise consumer’s awareness on energy-saving practices at home. The research approach explores the potential of social interaction and game mechanics in driving people towards long term behaviour change in...

In interaction design, attention has shifted from quantified-self and monitoring interfaces to wider gamified systems that challenge people to heal their lifestyle. This change has forced the promotion of task accomplishments, and the quantification of daily achievements and social relationships. While fostering self-learning in some cases is the k...

How to drive everyday life toward creativity and a positive state of mind? Can interaction design trigger emotions and reinforce well-being attitude? This paper is a 􀃥rst exploratory study of design research, trends and practices on how devices and interfaces could advance when engaging more deeply with the recognition of emotions. The purpose is t...

To test the effectiveness of competitive and collaborative settings on engaging households, a mobile app, called Social Power, was developed to provide electricity meter feedback in two gamified environments. The project aims at stimulating social engagement and promoting behavioural change to save electricity at the household level by forming team...

Design is a way of creating meaningful interactions. Cultivating a self-development approach through creative thinking, optimism and a positive attitude is part of that process. This emotional experience is an iterative activity in which body-mind and social life are connected. In this context interactive emotional-based interfaces can move people...

How can we encourage people to engage in more sustainable mobility lifestyles, reducing car use? Taking advantage of the wide availability of smartphones, we overcome the traditional awareness-raising approach and exploit eco-feedback, social norms and peer pressure elements in an ICT-based motivation system. We developed two smartphone Apps, whic...

The present study tests and compares the efficacy of two different social game modes, collaborative and competitive, as interventions to motivate electricity-saving behaviour at the household level by means of a gamified mobile App, called Social Power. The collaborative game has a common savings goal that the team aims to reach collectively. The c...

The present urban transportation system, mostly tailored for cars, has long shown its limitations. In many urban areas, alternative and effective transport modes are already available and they could be used in inter‐modal combinations to satisfy many travel needs: public transportation, slow mobility networks, vehicle‐sharing systems. However, thes...

C'è una relazione tra il design dell'interazione e il benessere? Possono gli strumenti digitali stimolare emozioni positive? Questo articolo propone un primo approccio al tema che considera il ruolo attuale del design dell'interazione e offre una prospettiva di come diversi aspetti teorici e tecno-logici possono integrarsi ed evolvere. Partendo dal...

Sustainable human-computer interaction is investigating the role of persuasive and gamified technologies in encouraging people to engage in a more sustainable lifestyle. Motivation is a key requirement for behavior change, yet many persuasive systems do not sufficiently account for motivational aspects. In this paper we investigate under which circ...

Poster presented at the 2015 SCCER Mobility annual conference

There is a growing interest in considering interaction aspects for the design of urban public places. Emerging approaches present different frames inherent to the interplay among people and information between us and address the role of urban infrastructures and technologies in encouraging interactions. In this paper we use the concept of Urban Int...

A change in how individuals consume energy is a key step in fighting climate change since it represents a crucial contribution to a more collective and sustainable lifestyle adoption. To carry out such process, designers and scientists are seeking new ways to increase public discussion and social involvement in energy reduction issues. In relation...

Energy is a component of all surroundings and is an essential invisible flow embedded in objects, buildings and electronic devices. Even if it connects individuals with the tangible word, people are seldom aware of the amount of energy they handle when using devices. The exploration of new interaction modes to evaluate energy consumption and relate...

The objective of this work is to suggest criteria and guidelines that can be used to design inclusive technological solutions to support human activity sharing in the context of Ambient Intelligence. These guidelines derive from the analysis of previous works in related fields such as cognitive engineering, usability, inclusive design and accessibi...

Seen through the eyes of games, urban environments can appear as museums, storytelling venues, or intense multi-user experiences that could attract people away from their living rooms into the city. Engaging physical, social, and emotional levels, urban games emerge today as powerful resources, able to lead to a playful reading of the augmented cit...

Seen through the eyes of games, urban environments can appear as museums, storytelling venues, or intense multi-user experiences that could attract people away from their living rooms into the city. Engaging physical, social, and emotional levels, urban games emerge today as powerful resources, able to lead to a playful reading of the augmented cit...

La presenza di artefatti ludici nella città contemporanea, analizzata con uno sguardo consapevole del portato storico e delle evoluzioni in atto. Una proposta tassonomica delle tipologie di giochi urbani, acocmpagnata da una riflessione sul ruolo del gioco nella percezione della vita cittadina e da una serie di esempi rilevanti.

The paper presents an inter-faculties experience stemming from the common interests of researchers and designers in ludic interactions between people and interfaces. The new territories mapped by the game and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigms in everyday communication interfaces are a shift in how design incorporates new functions and meaning. D...

Given the complexity of the interactive digital artifact, the collaborative design team has to include a multitude of actors with diverse competencies. How the design team fostering diversity [1] manages to create an internal language and how then this language is explained outside the work team through the final digital artifact are the issues tha...

In this paper we present GINA, a game design workshop at the Industrial Design Faculty of the Politecnico di Milano, performed during the last two academic years with the students of the first year of the master course (Laurea Magistrale). GINA stands for Gioco (game)-Interazione (interaction)-Narrazione (storytelling)-Animazione (animation). In th...