Hello everyone! I am Cecilia Baranauskas, I am Brazilian, affiliated as collaborator
to the University of Campinas, in São Paulo State, Brazil, where I developed my career
and where I live.
It is a huge privilege to figure among the 2021 awarded colleagues, especially as one
of the Social Impact Award holders.
I am also profoundly indebted to all my students, collaborators, and the Brazilian community
of HCI, without whom my understanding of the social aspects underlying technology design
would not have been constructed.
Do we need motives for being socially aware in design?
I don’t think so.
The computing technology and our way of relating to it, to others, and to ourselves, have changed
a lot along our still short history of computing technology.
The technological evolution along the history of computing has also added complexity with
social issues arising from the ubiquity of technology and the not always perceivable
interaction with it.
For example, situations of inadvertent capture of personal data in
smart environments, the combination of data with machine learning algorithms.
There are many ways of facing social responsibilities in design.
In my view, being socially aware in design must go beyond having underserved people informing
design or paying attention to the social implications of technology in different societies.
I like to think in technology as an emancipatory vehicle, with opportunities of growth for
people participating in its creation.
Within this background, I understand design as a social process of joint construction
of meaning - participatory sense-making in phenomenological terms, that manifests itself
in a social-physical-digital product that mediates our (inter)action
with the world.
This understanding for design presupposes a systemic view for computational systems,
which we have developed along the last 20 years, and we named the Socially Aware Design.
It is a process that recognizes and values social participation, and the intersubjective
aspects of interaction, in the process of designing and experimenting computing artefacts.
This talk is being illustrated with images of different Projects addressing design scenarios
of: digital divide, technology in Education, ubiquity and Socioenactive Systems
E-cidadania or E-Citizenship is a Project that aimed at promoting digital literacy and
ecitizenship within a low-income community of Campinas.
Results of this Project have shown mainly the autonomy of the participants to understand
and use not just this particular system, VilanaRede, but other social networks and IT systems as
well.
In the same neighborhood of the Project aimed at codesigning a new school setting with the
inclusion of XO laptops into the formal and informal children’s education.
The whole school community was involved: students, their parents, the school principal, pedagogical
coordinators, teachers, servants, among others.
The Socioenactive Project is being conducted with the partnership of three different institutions.
With them, we design and build artifacts of technology, and study the intersubjective
aspects of the experience in the constituted scenarios.
TangiTime, an artifact of the Socioenactive project, is an installation designed to address
the concept of “deep time”, the time for geological processes in scale of billions
of years.
With TangiTime, children can build their concepts of “deep time” by interacting with the
physical, digital and social elements coupled in the interaction scenario.
Once again, thank you very much for the Social Impact award, and your attention.