Recife, Brazil

IHC’08 (Porto Alegre, Brazil)

From the event’s website:

The Brazilian Symposium of Human Factors on Computer Systems (IHC) is the main forum of the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. This symposium brings together researchers, industry professionals, educators and students of various HCI-related disciplines, such as Computer Science, Psychology, Ergonomics and Graphic Design, among others.

We celebrate in 2008 the 10th anniversary of HCI events in Brazil. This has been a time for great progress: an entire generation of researchers has been produced spreading HCI knowledge countrywide. Usability and accessibility subjects have been integrated into governmental technological policies; industry is now fully aware of the importance of user-centered design practices. The event itself has solidified and expanded, giving birth to the Latin-American Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (CLIHC). Brazilian research has been acknowledged internationally and one of the major international conferences, the IFIP TC13 INTERACT has been hosted in Brazil in 2007.

During these past 10 years, we have reflected about the nature of Interaction. We managed to understand our users. We mastered the WWW and created solutions with emerging interaction technologies. Today, the relationship between humans and computers is an established and irrevocable fact. Interaction is now part of daily life: we are already living within ubiquitous computing; we are working on overcoming access barriers and on inclusion of disadvantaged populations. We are promoting society integration and disseminating the digital culture. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are intensely used by Brazilian population.

This scenario poses a challenge for researchers – thinking of users no more as individuals but as interconnected communities. Even the concept of interaction quality has to be broadened to encompass the diversity of interactive systems usage, like in entertainment, security in information exchange and broadcast, participation in social and democratic processes as well as applications in critical areas like health and environment.

Human Computer Interaction impregnates modern life. HCI today is structural for systems design. HCI is already permanent in human life. Each day, HCI is more and more natural.

Within the challenges to be addressed in the next decade, as proposed by the Brazilian Society for Computing – SBC - there are also challenges for the HCI community. We invite you to discuss HCI for today and for the next 10 years. In particular we welcome contributions related to aging and User eXperience (UX) which discusses the many roles played by interactive systems at the different phases of human life, including users who learned to use the computer before learning to read, users who employ computer in the daily life as a mean to gain productivity, for entertainment and/or to socialize, and those seniors users who are learning the new technologies to improve their quality of life.

Promotion: Brazilian Computing Society in cooperation with ACM/SIGCHI.

Posted in ACM SIGCHI | Calendar | Conference | Recife, Brazil
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List of Recife events in 2007/2008

Hi folks! As World Usability Day 2008 in Recife is coming soon,  we made a list of all events organized - or somehow supported - by UXrecife during 2007 and 2008. Here they are!

2007

• Inaugural meeting of UXrecife (January 25th at Paco Alfandega Shopping)
• Meeting: “What’s User Experience?” (March 21th at Softex)
• Videoconference with Amyris Fernandez: “Interaction Design, Going Beyond Usability” (April 2nd at C.E.S.A.R)
• Exhibition of GEL Conference 2006 videos (April 24th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Video exhibition about Paper Prototyping (May 30th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting: “Introducing Canola” (June 27th at Nokia INdT)
• Meeting with professor Robson Santos (July 11th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting: “What’s User Research?” (July 25th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting with professor Amanda Meincke (August 24th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting: “Revisiting INTERACT 2007″ (September 26th at Softex)
• Event: “World Usability Day 2007 in Recife” (November 8th at Livraria Cultura)
• Meeting: “Form Usability” (November 28th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting with Acesso Digital (December 6th at Softex)

2008

• Meeting with professor Maria de Fatima Vieira: “Product Usability, a competitive differential” (March 19th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting: “Regional and national UX industry” (April 30th at Marista College)
• Event: “1st Exhibition of Interaction Design Projects in Recife” (June 26th at Marista College)
• Meeting with Gustavo Morais: “Anthropology, Ethnography and Design” (August 20th at C.E.S.A.R)
• Meeting with professor Cristian Rusu: “HCI in the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile” (August 25th at C.E.S.A.R)

And get ready for WUD 2008 in Recife! UXrecife core team is organizing the last details for our second edition of World Usability Day in Recife :) From

Posted in Locales | Recife, Brazil
Tags: Brazil | uxrecife
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WUD 2007 in Recife, Brazil

Recife had its first World Usability Day event this year. It was a unique opportunity when almost everyone involved with UCD in Recife got together to talk about what local industry and academia are doing and what they are going to do in the next years.

Most of attendees were local leaders, professors, practitioners, students and general audience. We received almost 200 people, though our expectations were 100 attendees. The event was completely free. It started at 5:00pm and lasted until 10:00pm, due only to the advanced hour. All the presentations, interviews and debates (podcasts and videos) are going to be available soon on the event website.

WUD Recife was organized by UXrecife, which is a fruit of UXnet and was proudly supported by it. We have never organized any event, but team work and volunteering can do more than you realize! UXrecife has now more than 80 colaborators and people in Recife are even more passionate about developing a UCD culture in our locale. WUD was a great opportunity to deeply understand our local context and comunicate the value of user experience design to the whole community.

As a local ambassador in a country where UCD is in its first steps, i’d like to encourage all people in similar settings to keep the hard work of evangelizing the bennefits of user experience among companies around you. WUD is a great chance to do that, so get started to think about your 2008 local event!

Posted in Recife, Brazil
Tags: WUD2007recap
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World Usability Day 2007 in Recife

This year, UXrecife is organizing the first edition of World Usability Day in Recife. Usability practitioners and researchers will talk about their ideas on how industry and academia can act to empower the culture of human-centered Design in our city. The event will take place November 8th (Thursday) at the auditorium of Livraria Cultura.

Event schedule

17h00 - Opening

17h15 - Presentations

• Genésio Gomes Neto (FIR)
• H.D.Mabuse (Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems)
• Marcelo Eduardo (Nokia Institute of Technology)
• Ubirajara de Lucena (Móbile)

19h15 - Coffee-break

19h30 - Debate: “Past, present and future of UCD in Recife”

• Luciano Meira (Department of Psychology, UFPE)
• Alex Sandro (Center for Informatics, UFPE)
• H.D.Mabuse (Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems)
• Marcos Buccini (AESO & Faculdade Marista)

20h30 - Closing

More information: www.wudrecife.com.br

Posted in Calendar | Recife, Brazil
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Welcome to Recife

Recife (Portuguese for ‘reef’) is the 3rd largest city in the Northeastern Region of Brazil and the 5th largest metropolitan area in Brazil (3.6 million people). It’s becoming a reference for newly industrialized countries due to Porto Digital, the ICT cluster with a focus on software development. Surrounded by rivers and crossed by bridges, Recife is known as the Brazilian Venice and considered one of Brazil’s cultural capitals.

Here in Recife we launched a happy-hour network of UX practitioners in February. We call it UXrecife. The group has about 70 people from many different professional backgrounds, most of them working with UX design. Our main need/purpouse was to get people knowing each other, making friends. We strongly believe that it is the first step in order to raise an environment where greater things can be planned and run. Our basic principles are fun, informality and volunteering.

We have one presencial meeting per month, facilitated by one or more volunteers. It’s when everybody gets together to discuss the last news on UX, watch related videos and so on. Much talk, food and fun!

The remaining issues are discussed on our email list (e.g. opinios about new products, organizing barcamps, WUD events, UX conferences etc.). Since the beginning of our Yahoo group, we have had more than 2000 messages. People are very enthusiastic, including professionals from the entire country.

Our group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/uxrecife
Our blog: http://uxrecife.blogspot.com
Our WUD 2007 site: http://www.wudrecife.com.br

Posted in Recife, Brazil
Tags: LocaleWelcome
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