Facing the digital divide in a participatory way - An exploratory study

Abstract

One of Brazilian's grand challenges in computer science research concerns a "Participative and universal access to knowledge for the Brazilian citizen". In order to develop design solutions to address this challenge, we first need to understand these citizen's abilities and the context in which they are immersed. For that, we have been conducting practices actively involving a group of representatives of the diversity of users we have in the population. This paper presents the first results of this investigation, pointing out some lessons learned so far regarding the relationship they have with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and how they make sense of different models of interaction to accomplish a simple task related to the exercise of citizenship. Among other findings, we were able to notice how their previous experience reflects on their behavior and the benefits of using an avatar in future systems. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.