Vinicius Carvalho Pereira

Social Network Users’ Religiosity and the Design of Post Mortem Aspects

Social networks increase the challenges of designing real-world aspects whose computational abstraction is not simple. This includes death and digital legacy, strongly influenced by cultural phenomena, such as religion. Therefore, it is important to analyze youngsters’ concepts of death in the web, as the Internet Generation outnumbers other groups of social network users. Besides, due to their age, many of them face other people’s death for the first time on the web. This paper analyzes to what extent these users’ religion and the belief in afterlife may signal guidelines for a social network project that considers volition towards digital legacy. The data herein analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively come from a survey-based research with Brazilian high school students. The contributions for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies comprise design solutions that may consider aspects of religion, death and digital legacy, also improving users’ and designers’ understanding on these issues in system design.

A customized mobile application for a cerebral palsy user

Mobile web has created several opportunities for the development of assistive technologies that can support disabled people in the performance of daily life activities. Mobile applications can be developed using participatory design methods which result in customized assistive solutions. In this paper, we describe the development of a mobile application to support M, a man with cerebral palsy in his communication and professional activities, highlighting the use of a participatory design method. We discuss the changes that mobile web can bring to disabled peoples lives, in the light of this experience. We conclude that mobile web applications can be configured as interesting solutions for assistive technologies.

Virtual Homage to the Dead: An Analysis of Digital Memorials in the Social Web

Considering that many real-world cultural practices are now migrating to virtual environments, the expression of mourning and bereavement is also being imported to the virtual world, by means of the so-called digital memorials, supported by increasingly new and complex technologies. In this paper, we undertake a literature review on real and digital memorials, as well as social networks. Then, through empirical observation of digital memorials in Brazil, we investigate if they have characteristics of the social web. Next, by means of an interaction test and a questionnaire, we analyze how users feel when interacting with digital memorials and their evaluation on the functionalities of those applications. Finally, we approach the difficulties found when studying this kind of tools and our perspectives for future works.

Exploring the Communication of Cultural Perspectives in Death-Related Interactive Systems

This paper analyzes the communication of cultural issues in death-related interactive systems, based on the exploration of an app that supports visits to cemeteries. The inspection, analysis and discussion of the results are grounded on the theoretical and methodological bases of Semiotic Engineering. The main contribution of the paper is to help designers of systems in this domain: a. define the interface mediation between users and contents from a foreign culture; and b. organize and express these contents.

Human Values in HCI: a challenge for the GrandIHC-BR

In 2012, the Brazilian HCI community identified Five Grand Research Challenges in Brazil, for the timespan between 2012 and 2022. In this paper, we discuss 3 issues: (a)what our community has done so far to advance with Challenge 4 - Human Values; (b) what results had effective impacts; and (c) what challenges remain and/or have come up. To do so, we present our perspectives on studies related to the three central axes of this challenge (ethics, privacy and post-mortem digital legacy), along with their potential impacts. Our observations point out that a compartmentalized, narrow mindset might be preventing us from advancing to greater reflections, which could challenge paradigms and articulate the aforementioned axes within the Grand Challenges.

From Real Tombs to Digital Memorials: An Exploratory Study in Multicultural Elements for Communication

This research is based on a semiotic analysis of tombs and tombstones in order to discuss elements that might be useful for software design, especially of digital memorials. In this research, Saussurean semiotics was considered.

The life cycle of a customized communication device for a child with cerebral palsy: contributions toward the PD4CAT method

BackgroundIn this paper, we report the results of an action research conducted to design a communication device to help a non-verbal child develop language skills. Participatory design (PD) is frequently regarded as a convenient approach for designing high assistive technology (HAT) for people with serious speech impairments. However, our literature survey has shown that PD is used in an ad hoc fashion, and so a methodological framework for the inception, construction, and evaluation of HATs is still missing.MethodsPD4CAT, a participatory design method for customized assistive technology, was used to direct this research.ResultsThis method led to the engagement of an impaired child (besides other participants) as a co-designer of a customized assistive technology for his own use. The system resulting from actions performed during this research has helped the child in his rehabilitation process by means of the customized assistive computational technology developed within PD4CAT.ConclusionThe contributions of this action research include the improvement of PD4CAT by means of guidelines to engage a non-verbal child in participatory design practices, in order to incept his assistive computational technology.

Applying the Discourse Theory to the Moderator’s Interferences in Web Debates

This paper presents a methodology for supporting the moderation phase in DCC (Democratic Citizenship Community), a virtual community for supporting e-democratic processes in e-life systems and applications. Based on the Government-Citizen Interactive Model, the DCC encompasses an innova- tive debate structure, as well as the moderators participation based on Dis- course Theory, specially concerning argumentative mistakes. Concerning the moderators role, efforts have been made in order to improve the formalization of arguments and opinions while maintaining the usability of the platform. This research focuses on the moderators participation via a case study and the ex- periment is analyzed in a Web debate.

Identifying discourse mistakes in web debates: moderation in the DCC

Integrating consultative and deliberative environments for popular participation in democratic issues and creating virtual communities make it possible to model decision-making processes. For this reason, the Democratic Citizenship Community (DCC) was developed, based on the Government-Citizen Interactive Model. In this model, debates are structured in a different manner and the moderators participation in debates is based on Discourse Theory, in relation to discourse mistakes. This research analyzes the moderators role by means of a case study.

Interacting with digital memorials in a cemetery: Insights from an immersive practice

This research intends to analyze how users that are also HCI designers relate to the interaction with digital memorials linked to graves through QRcodes. To do so, we have carried out an immersive practice in the Consolação Cemetery (São Paulo, Brazil), where that technology is used to tag the graves of famous deceased people and to guide the visitors in the site. Those QR code tags link the graves to an online application for digital memorials called MemoriAll. To address the problem, this paper analyzes the data collected from the surveys answered by the research subjects before and after the immersive practice, along with data from a semiotic inspection of MemoriAll.