About Gustavo Fortes Tondello

Gustavo is a Ph.D. student at University of Waterloo under supervision of Dr. Lennart Nacke and Dr. Daniel Vogel. His main interests include gamification and games for health and learning. His research focus on the design of gameful applications. He earned his M.Sc. in Computer Science and his B.Sc. in Information Systems from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. His M.Sc. thesis in Software Engineering focused on the semantic specification of Quality of Service for Semantic Web Services. His B.Sc. thesis focused on configuration management of Embedded Operating Systems using Application Oriented System Design. Before coming to Canada, he worked for several years as a Software Engineer in Brazil. Gustavo is also a researcher of the Logosophical Science affiliated to the Logosophical Foundation of Brazil.

Positive Computing: A novel research field to promote human well being

Posted on August 23, 2016 by Gustavo Fortes Tondello

Technology has undoubtedly improved at vertiginous speeds in the last decades. However, there is no evidence that all this technology is helping increase the people’s general wellbeing. Calvo and Peters have attributed this to the fact that most technology professionals keep a machine-focused view of their work, avoiding to look at anything related to the user’s wellbeing. Nevertheless, recently there has been a growing body of efforts related to using technology to improve human wellbeing. Calvo and Peters refer to this new research field as Positive Computing.

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An Introduction to Gamification in Human-Computer Interaction

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Gustavo Fortes Tondello

User experience (UX) is a field within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that studies the whole experience of a user with a product, system, or service. UX focuses on issues such as usability, ergonomics, cognitive load, and affective experiences. However, in the last years, there is a particular growing interest in understanding users’ motivation to use a product, system, or service. This interest is spawned by observable low engagement rates: it is not enough to have a useful system, one needs to also motivate and engage users in it. One possible solution to this comes from a field of study is called gamification or gameful design¹, because its main inspiration comes from understanding the factors that make games fun and motivate people to play them voluntarily with so much engagement. Continue reading →

ACM CHI PLAY 2015: XRDS insider’s view!

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Gustavo Fortes Tondello

CHI PLAY 2015 is the second edition of the ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. It is an international and interdisciplinary conference for researchers and professionals of all areas of play, games, and human-computer interaction, which fosters discussion of current high quality research in games and HCI as foundations for the future of digital play. This year the conference took place in London, UK, from the 5^th to the 7^th of October. Continue reading →