Roberto Calderon

Towards supporting informal information and communication practices within a Brazilian healthcare environment

We present the initial challenges of supporting ad-hoc socialization patterns that can promote community workflow behaviours using information and communication technologies. Following a participatory design process, we introduced a task-management system into a Brazilian community of healthcare professionals that have little or no previous experience with digital information technologies. Our initial observations point to designing simple interfaces that can be adapted by the community, focusing on semantic mining, and further understanding the socio-demographic, behavioural and intra-personal characteristics that promote reciprocal actions.

RED: a framework for prototyping multi-display applications using web technologies

We present the Really Easy Displays framework (RED), a web-based platform to facilitate spontaneous interaction between devices and applications. RED provides a single abstraction for content and interaction between display types, data streams and interaction modalities, and allows developers to create multi-display applications by enabling the sharing of web document object models (DOMs) across displays. We present lessons learned from using RED in our own research, hands-on workshops with developers and interviews with long-term developers over the course of a year. We provide initial evidence that the use of web-technologies in a framework like RED can mitigate some barriers encountered in by multi-display interaction scenarios, and we propose future work to improve RED.

Supporting Conversation and Community Interaction With A Table-Top Community Garden Application

Third places are social places like coffee shop and bars, where people come together to catch up with friends and meet new people. Our research explores how Ubiquitous Computing experiences in public space, particularly interactive public displays, can be leveraged to encourage interaction between strangers. We present a multi-display application based on the metaphor of a table-top community garden. This application is built using our Really Easy Displays (RED) framework, a set of web based technologies that allow the rapid development of applications that span multiple displays, sensors and actuators. The prototype makes use of a situated large screen, a projected surface and an Arduino microcontroller to support collaborative interaction, by allowing groups of people to collectively nurture a table-top garden by interacting with furniture, touch-enabled projections and mobile phones.

Workshop on human computer interaction in third places.

Third places are places that are neither home nor work, where people voluntarily come together to socialize. Third places are essential to social life because they provide a common ground where different communities can meet, and they promote a sense of place. Emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the way we use such third places, altering how we interact with other people and how communities are formed. The goal of the first Workshop on Human Computer Interaction in Third Places is to provide a forum where researchers can discuss the intersection between computing and third places. We aim to develop a research agenda and to initiate collaboration between researchers to better understand the roles of ICT in such places.

Pervasive Displays 2013

The Second International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis 13) brought together a diverse group of researchers working on the design of novel pervasive displays. Many challenges in this field were addressed: How do people encounter public displays? What are the key usability and design factors when creating and deploying applications for such displays? How do local communities adopt pervasive displays, and how are they affected by such displays?

Tutorial on Human Computer Interaction for Third Places - THCI-3P

Third places are places that are neither home nor work, where people voluntarily come together to socialize. Third places are essential to social life because they provide a common ground where different communities can meet, and they promote a sense of place. Emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the way we use such third places, altering how we interact with other people and how communities are formed. The goal of the first Tutorial on Human Computer Interaction in Third Places is to provide a forum where researchers can discuss the intersection between computing and third places. We aim to introduce the theoretical basis of third place concepts as well as methods, techniques and tools to support developing a research agenda and to initiate collaboration between researchers to better understand the roles of ICT in such places.

Towards Supporting the Existing Workplace Practices of a Community of Brazilian Healthcare Professionals

With the increasing affordability of computers, displays and telecommunications, the scenario of introducing digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into communities with little or no previous exposure to computing has become common place. Understanding how ICT affects the functioning of such communities is important for determining design and introduction strategies that can minimize the disruption of well established practices in said scenarios. We designed and introduced a ticketing system within a community of Brazilian healthcare professionals that have little or no previous exposure to computing. Visualizing individual people led to tasks directed towards particular individuals. Visualizing people interactions promoted open-ended and communal tasks. We observed that professionals circumvented the original design of the system to introduce unimplemented functionalities and support their well-established social-based information management practices.