Giulio Jacucci
Ph.D, leader, Ubiquitous Interaction research group, HIIT Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Performative Interactions
In the Ubiquitous Interaction group, we explore how interaction technologies can transform public places from alienating spaces (cfr. "non-lieux" Marc Augé) into performing stages and platforms for reflection. We design for appropriation and emergence to improve or change the way we use public places (used to move, host attractions, events, communal activities) augmenting: engagement with the other - expressing, encountering, feeling, exchanging, co-experiencing with others; engagement with the environment - places, or things, playing, understanding, feeling the environment in new ways. Interaction technologies include mixed reality and tangible interfaces to manipulate the physical and virtual (aural, visual, tactile) affordances of places; multimodal empathic and affective interfaces for natural experiential interactions. Such interfaces acquire a spatial dimension, integrate material aspects, bodily movements and propose configurability as a central feature.
An anthropological perspective on performance addresses these aspects in a coherent way, pointing to sense experience, the individuality and collective emergence of expression and its diachronic and event-like character. Events are the outcome of configurations of space, artifacts and digital media, by a simultaneousness of doing and undergoing, of bodily presence and representation. Implications of interaction as performance shift our focus: from task to event; from recognition to Dewey's concept of perception, from accountability and usability to expression. This can on one hand create new social practices to foster cohesion, exchange, community building and on the other create practices of reflection including the envisioning, imaging, and reprogramming of places.
Giulio Jacucci , Ph.D. leads Ubiquitous Interaction, a research group at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Jacucci leads national and European funded research focusing on user experience of ubiquitous and mixed reality applications. His current research includes: ubiquitous applications in large-scale events such as rock festivals, sport, and cultural events (Celtic db Wireless Festival), mixed reality and presence in urban environments (FET EU IST IPcity), multimodal and affective interfaces in art and entertainment (EU IST CALLAS). Jacucci serves as a member of program and organizing committee of several conferences in mobile HCI, tangible and embedded computing, design research. Jacucci has received a Ph.D. from the University of Oulu completing a doctoral dissertation on applying an anthropological perspective of performance to the design of mixed reality environments. Jacucci has over 30 publications in journals, international conferences and books investigating interaction design and user experience of ubiquitous and tangible computing.