Wednesday 11 January 2017 – Lunchtime seminar with Prof Antonella De Angeli (Computer Science, University of Lincoln & University of Trento)

Antonella di Angeli seminar image

Speaker: Professor Antonella De Angeli (University of Lincoln, School of Computer Science & University of Trento (Italy), Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science)
Title: Public Design in interAction Spaces – A Case Study on Dyslexia Awareness

Antonella De Angeli is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Lincoln and Associate Professor at the University of Trento (Italy). Antonella research investigates cognitive, social and political aspects of information technologies with an emphasis on the application of this knowledge to interaction design. Antonella holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Trieste (Italy) where she also completed a 2-year post-doctoral research in Applied Cognitive Psychology. During that period, she was awarded a NSF scholarship at the Center for Human-Computer Communication of the Oregon Graduate Institute (Portland, USA), and spent 6 months as invited researcher at Loria (Nancy, France) and IRST (Trento, Italy). From 2000 to 2004 Antonella was a senior HCI researcher for the Advanced Technology and Research group of NCR (UK). Later, she joined the School of Informatics of the University of Manchester as lecturer and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in HCI at the Manchester Business School in 2007. In 2008 Antonella became Associate Professor at the University of Trento (Italy) where she founded and still leads the interAction lab. She finally joined the University of Lincoln in September 2016. She regularly sits in the program committee of leading conferences (e.g., CHI, CSCW, ECSCW, PD) and has been involved in several EC founded projects including in FP7 ServFace and Dali’ and in Horizon 2020 Acanto and PieNews (coordinator).

In this talk, I elaborate on public design as a way forward for a more democratic innovation. I define public design as the process of scaling up engagement in participatory design, expanding the space of participation for a vast and heterogeneous ensemble of people and things, which together engage in collective actions for the common good. We denote this innovation milieu as interAction spaces – physical and virtual points of encounters between people, who mobilise around public issues, and technology, used as a fluid medium to facilitate collective action. The talk grounds on the HCI literature, as the interdisciplinary emphasis of this field of study provides a distinct perspective to our argument. In return, it contributes to HCI with a holistic framework reconciling different epistemologies of user research. This framework was instantiated in a two-year project leading to public mobilisation around the conflictual issue of developmental dyslexia in Italy. The project originated on autobiographical reflections, and was embraced by several heterogeneous networks of actors (researchers from different disciplines, parents, children, public institutions, and business organizations) and tools (public events, social networks, serious games, and critical design artefacts). This movement of people and things challenged the dominant medical narrative of dyslexia in Italy and in doing so it infrastructured the space for a more inclusive educational system, respectful of different skills and abilities. While reflecting on this experience, comparing and contrasting it with related work, I will elaborate on the idea of interAction spaces as the point of convergence between different epistemologies, knowledge, and practices. Their role is to articulate these controversies, enact possible solutions, and sustain emerging practices in a public design process.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
WEDNESDAY 11 JANUARY 2017
CANTOR 9129

 

See here for details of other seminars in the series.

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.