is a Research Scientist holding a PhD in Digital Media and a very enthusiastic Professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She focuses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research in cultural heritage sites and participatory design methods. Vanessa’s doctoral research studies explored how digital technologies can help museums create immersive museum experiences for teenagers through digital storytelling and gamification frameworks. Based on her findings, Vanessa led the production and testing of two interactive mobile experiences for a natural history museum: a story-based approach, and a game-based one. Currently, Vanessa is a postdoc at ITI/LARSyS (ARDITI fellow) in Portugal, researching participatory approaches and co-design techniques to enhance the participation of marginalized communities in cultural heritage. Also, she collaborates in the Horizon 2020 project MEMEX by deploying and evaluating co-design and app re-design workshops with users to inform the MEMEX mobile app. Vanessa’s scientific work on participatory design, user studies and evaluations have been published in many international conferences and journals in the fields of HCI, Museums, and Interaction Design and Children.
last update: March 2022
Articles published on IXD&A:
"This article investigates the role of storytelling in video game localisation and its impact on players’ immersion and overall gaming experience. While these topics have been extensively studied and d..."
"We believe that challenging times demand HCI education to pay attention to current real-life, complex, systemic problems. Therefore, we suggest an integrated framework for teaching HCI that involves c..."
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