About

I am privileged to have benefitted from a nursery and 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 a beneficiary, is that this experience was only made possible given the encounter of uniquely skilled, caring and restless school personnel with a determined and very positive vision towards early childhood education, which has been reflected in the introduction of innovative educational methods – in the sense of their humanity.

The title of this project pays tribute to one of such methods, based on Freinet’s pedagogy, the “We Want to Do” (“Queremos Fazer”) item of a Wall Journal 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 example has been our immersion in the storytelling of fantastical, moral rich tales, 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 seeking for clues in the neighbourhood of our school to unriddle the mysterious existence of King Arthur, 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 education activities and formal education goals with fantastical narratives where children are protagonists.

I trust that such a platform may positively contribute to level among households the quality and frequency of the stimuli that children are subjected to out of school. To do so it is considered fundamental to co-design this platform with a broadly distributed sample, resources wise, of those who truly own the stakes and so deserve the central role in this process – teachers, caregivers and children.

There is a commitment with the subject of early childhood informal education and the method proposed that goes beyond this project, as it is hopefully attested by the informal founding of this Quarto Crescente as a living lab intended to gather interest co-designers, researchers and partners, and plant seeds 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

I have been consciously accumulating tools and experience to reach the maturity considered necessary to finally invest in my academic career in this field (human-computer interaction – HCI), subject (childhood education), and method (exploratory co-design) early since my higher education enrolment. My will to contribute to the tangibility of innovation in HCI first got declared by a proactive participation in a college-level idea contest with the project Mosaico, early in my studies, which was recognised by faculty and led to the invitation to co-represent my college in a national-wide contest of innovation for the energy grid that awarded our project EGGY as winner (2014). My contribution at this first design stage was a pull away of technological determinism, which was very present in the final proposal – EGGY was not as innovative from a technological standpoint as it was in how technology was embedded in user practices and motivations. It proposed to facilitate the awareness of behaviours, instead of precise but frequently unintelligible electric variables, and a social game to keep the user in the system’s loop as an actor rather than having users’ faulty actions superimposed silently by a correcting smart technology. The responsibility to lead the product ownership and development in its many facets was assumed, which considered the coordination of outsourced teams of developers and designers and the management of the relationship with the utility company that financed this project.

As a next step in my career (2019) a user-experience consulting company was joined with the goal of developing my toolset and know-how in qualitative research and co-design practice from experienced professionals in this field, with large organisations.

These tools were put to use back in 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 considered field research and managing co-design sessions.

Considering myself equipped to fully invest in my 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 & fictional narratives for social change (Geoff Kaufman, CMU, USA).