Speaker: Luigina Ciolfi, Professor of Human Computer Interaction, UCC School of Applied Psychology

Respondent: Professor Myriam Lewkowicz, Troyes University of Technology

Thursday 5-7pm, March 23rd @ 5pm in Aula Maxima

An open discussion and wine reception will follow the lecture

Museums and cultural heritage sites have been a fertile research ground for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, creative design, and technology deployment for several decades, often complementing curatorial and interpretation and public engagement strategies developed by the heritage sector. On a more general level, cultural heritage has been an important domain to be studied within HCI from the point of view of challenging assumptions with notions of “use”, “user” and “interaction” around technology. The history of HCI research in the heritage domain indeed reflects successive “waves”, i.e. evolving disciplinary paradigms by which HCI researchers conceptualise and involve people in the study of interactive technologies. Reflecting on issues at both domain-specific and disciplinary levels, this talk will make the case for a practice-centred approach to HCI research on cultural heritage, arguing for the need to develop in-depth understandings of how heritage and the (present and future) technologies that facilitate encountering it become part of people’s lives. Examples from past and current projects in the heritage domain will be used to illustrate and reflect on evolving processes of technology design involving “users”, “participants” and “co-creators” in a socially-situated and materially-entangled way. A practice-centred approach in HCI will also be argued as contributing to current critical heritage discourse, and as a way to examine influential technological trends such as big data and AI and their application for cultural heritage interpretation.

Luigina Ciolfi is Professor of Human Computer Interaction in the UCC School of Applied Psychology and member of the People and Technology Research Group. A Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) scholar, she researches the understanding, practicing and designing of digital interactive systems from a socio-technical perspective. She has served in numerous roles for scientific committees, funding agencies and public bodies. She has been an invited speaker in fifteen countries, and has authored over 120 publications. Professor Ciolfi is a Member of EUSSET - The European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies; Senior Member and Distinguished Speaker, ACM – The Association for Computing Machinery; and graduate member of the British Psychological Society. 

Myriam Lewkowicz is Professor at Troyes University of Technology where she heads the pluridisciplinary research group Tech-CICO and the master program. She is interested in defining digital technologies to support existing collective practices or to design new collective activities. This interdisciplinary research proposes reflections and approaches for the analysis and the design of new products and services to support cooperative work. The main application domains for this research for the last fifteen years have been healthcare (social support, coordination, telemedicine) and the industry (digital transformation, maintenance). She is the current chair of the European scientific association EUSSET, and is deputy editor-in-chief of the CSCW journal, « The Journal of Collaborative Computing and Work Practices.