About

I am privileged to have benefitted from a primary schooling experience which I still to this day much fondly cherish, hold as a fundamental foundation and credit a determining influence in the opportunities for personal accomplishment that I have been exposed to since then. I recognise a strong bond with this early life experience and the people who made it – colleagues, all school personnel, friends and family – which I do not commonly see matched. My understanding, as beneficiary, is that this experience was only made possible given the encounter of uniquely skilled, caring and relentless school personnel with a very positive vision towards early childhood education, which has been reflected in the introduction of innovative educational methods – in the sense of their humanity.

One of such methods is a wall journal, based on Freinet’s pedagogy, posted in each classroom, where children were incited to propose extra-curricular activities to the class, through writing or drawing, that were discussed collectively in meetings held on a weekly basis.

Another is our immersion in fantasy universes, first with story listening sessions in class and then with our embodiment in these stories’ universes, in our time and spaces, through educational activities that were not only related to them but that made us feel in the middle of them.

I recall with affection the thrill of hunting for clues in the neighbourhood of our school to unlock the secrets of King Arthur and the Round Table, from being read the trilogy of Michel Rio, and I have the landscape of Earthsea as a place where school sometimes travelled to, from the tales of Ursula K. Le Guin.

I envision a possibility to make this experience reach more children by empowering caregivers as storytellers and providing them with a framework for role play that binds informal learning activities and children’s development goals with fantastical narratives where children are protagonists.

I trust that such a platform may contribute to level the engagement of children and their families in their informal learning out-of-school and, with that, help mitigate educational inequalities. For so, and to assess this contribution, it is considered fundamental to co-design this platform with a diverse sample of educational contexts.

There is a commitment with the subject of childhood informal learning and its co-design that is pretended to go beyond this project. To declare this the Quarto Crescente lab is informally founded, with the hope that a community starts to be gathered around it and seeds are planted for future work, as I would be very happy with the chance of assuming this as a career-long cause.

— Pedro Silva Ferreira, Proponent Researcher

The Human-Computer Interaction field and my interest in it was first revealed to me through proactively submitting to a college projects’ contest a project named Mosaico that regarded a spatial operating system. This initiative was recognised by faculty and led to the invitation to co-represent the college enrolled in a national-wide contest of innovation for the energy grid, which would award our project EGGY as winner (2014). I see my contribution as considering a pull away of technological determinism, which ended up being very present in the final proposal – EGGY was not as innovative technologically as it was in how technology was embedded in the user practices and motivations. It proposed to facilitate the awareness of behaviours, instead of precise but frequently unintelligible and unactionable electric variables, and to introduce a social game to keep the user in the system’s loop. I assumed product ownership and development roles, which included tasks as the coordination of outsourced teams of developers and designers and the management of the relationship with the utility company that financed this project.

For the follow up of this project I recognised that I should develop my toolset and know-how in qualitative research and co-design practices by partnering with experienced professionals in this field, and so I joined a user-experience design consulting company.

These tools would be put to use in a return to academia as a project for the sustainability and safety of artisanal fishing was later joined (2020), filling a lead product designer and developer role that also included field research tasks and managing co-design sessions.

Considering myself equipped to fully invest in my HCI academic career I proposed this project in 2021.

— Pedro S. Ferreira, PhD Candidate, Project Researcher

This research work is being conducted under the Doctoral Program of Digital Media, offered in consortium by Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL) and Universidade do Porto (UP), following the specialization in Audiovisual Creation and Interactive Content. The enrolment at UNL, in the academic year of 2021/2022, considers the conduction of this research work between the colleges of Science and Technology (FCT) and of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH) of this institution. The approval of this work plan, in February 2023, grants its incubation within the ICNOVA research center and iNOVA Media Lab research group of FCSH. It contemplates three supervisors, representing respectively the knowledge domains of media and education (Cristina Ponte, UNL, Portugal), information technology (Nuno Correia, UNL, Portugal), and games and storytelling for social change (Geoff Kaufman, CMU, USA).