We welcome Carla Griggio, who has joined the HCC group as newly appointed Assistant Professor starting September 1st.

Carla Griggio pursued her degree in Information Systems Engineering in Argentina, where she specialized in web development and developed a keen interest in creating user-friendly interfaces. This newfound passion catalyzed her application to the EIT Digital master’s degree program in Human-Computer Interaction and Design in Europe.

After graduating, she tried entrepreneurship for some time but realized that what she enjoyed most was finding exciting problems and ideating non-trivial designs. This realization propelled her toward the pursuit of a PhD. Carla successfully obtained her PhD from Inria and Université Paris-Saclay in France under the guidance of Wendy Mackay, where she researched gesture interaction and digital communication tools.

Your research area and focus?

- I do research in HCI, and more specifically in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). The general goal of my research is to grant users more control over how they manage their relationships, their personal expression and their privacy when communicating online. For this I conduct empirical studies (e.g., interviews, large-scale questionnaires), build new prototypes and test them in the real world (e.g., in field studies), and also develop new concepts that can help us with novel designs.

In particular, I focus my research on ecosystems of messaging apps. This means that rather than creating or studying a particular app, I take a systemic approach that acknowledges that every communication tool that we use, we use it next to many others, and that the way we learn to communicate with one tool will also influence the way we communicate with others.

So when thinking about how to grant users more control over their online communication, some of the questions my research deals with are:

• How can we have more control over where to communicate with whom, without feeling overwhelmed with so many apps?
• How can we have more control over the media that we use to express ourselves (e.g., stickers, voice messages, reactions), regardless of the different functionality offered by different apps?
• How can we have more control over our data and privacy preferences, especially when using multiple platforms with different policies and settings?

Projects you are/will be involved in?

- One of my ongoing collaborations is with Susanne Bødker, Boel Nelson and Aslan Askarov from Aarhus University in projects about metadata anonymity and misunderstandings about privacy and security in ecosystems of messaging apps.

I’m also collaborating with Garreth Tigwell (RIT, US) and Benjamin Gorman (Bournemouth University, UK) on dedicated tools for supporting emoji accessibility in online communication and generally improving the way that screen readers mediate text-based conversations.

My future projects will focus more on interoperability for digital communication tools and its effects on how people manage relationships online. I’m currently studying users’ experiences with interoperable messaging in an interview study with Matrix.org users, which is the first step of a larger vision on how interoperability and richer customizations can fundamentally increase the control people have over their digital communication channels.

Why did you choose to continue your career at AAU?

- I found the PBL approach to teaching very interesting, it resonates a lot with how I imagined education should be back when I was a student. I’m also excited to join the HCC group! They have a great publication record and work with very diverse research methods that I’m sure will inspire new directions in my research agenda.