Ferran Altarriba Bertran is a playful interaction designer and researcher from Barcelona, currently finishing his PhD in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. Ferran’s research explores how to design everyday-use technologies that afford playful engagement with mundane activities to respond to people’s socio-emotional needs.
In his doctoral research, Ferran centered on human-food interaction and smart cities as areas of playful intervention; in his post-doc work within the Gamification Group, he is shifting gears to investigate the design of playful technology for experiences with(in) nature. Ferran holds a double BA (Hons) degree in Multimedia and Interaction Design from the University of Girona (Catalonia) and the University of Lincoln (UK). He also graduated as a MSc in IT Product Design at the University of Southern Denmark, where he specialized on Participatory Innovation, and Playful and Embodied Design. He’s also done shorter stays at other institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University (US), PHL Hasselt (Belgium), and TU/e Eindhoven (Netherlands), and lectured at Designskolen Kolding (Denmark) and EU ERAM (Catalonia).
Overall, Ferran’s work is concerned with the underpinnings of the applied, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings of playful design.
Publications
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Alexandra Pometko, Muskan Gupta, Lauren Wilcox, Reeta Banerjee, and Katherine Isbister. 2021. The Playful Potential of Shared Mealtime: a speculative catalog of playful technologies for day-to-day social eating experiences. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 5, CHI PLAY, Article 267 (September 2021), 26 pages, 10.1145/3474694
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Jared Duval, Laura Bisbe Armengol, Ivy Chen, Victor Dong, Binaisha Dastoor, Adrià Altarriba Bertran, and Katherine Isbister. 2021. A Catalog of Speculative Playful Urban Technology Ideas: Exploring the Playful Potential of Smart Cities. In Academic Mindtrek 2021 (Mindtrek ’21), June 01–03, 2021, Tampere/Virtual, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. 10.1145/3464327.3464374
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Elena Márquez Segura and Katherine Isbister. 2020. Technology for Situated and Emergent Play: A Bridging Concept and Design Agenda. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. 10.1145/3313831.3376859
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Jared Duval, Elena Márquez Segura, Laia Turmo Vidal, Yoram Chisik, Marina Juanet Casulleras, Oscar Garcia Pañella, Katherine Isbister and Danielle Wilde. 2020. Chasing Play Potentials in Food Culture: Learning from Traditions to Inspire Future Human-Food Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 979–991. 10.1145/3357236.3395575
- Markéta Dolejšová, Hilary Davis, Ferran Altarriba Bertran and Danielle Wilde. 2020. Feeding the Futures of Human-Food Interaction. interactions 27, 5 . (September – October 2020), 34–39. 10.1145/3414471
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Laia Turmo Vidal, Ella Dagan, Elena Márquez Segura, Jared Duval, and Katherine Isbister. 2020. Chasing Play with Instagram: How Can We Capture Mundane Play Potentials to Inspire Interaction Design?. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8. 10.1145/3334480.3382913
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Elena Márquez Segura, Jared Duval and Katherine Isbister. 2019. Chasing Play Potentials: Towards an Increasingly Situated and Emergent Approach to Everyday Play Design. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1001-1015. 10.1145/3322276.3322325
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran*, Samvid Jhaveri, Rosa Lutz, Katherine Isbister and Danielle Wilde*. 2019. Making Sense of Human-Food Interaction. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. 10.1145/3290605.3300908 (* joint first-authors)
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran*, Danielle Wilde*, Ernő Berezvay and Katherine Isbister. 2019. Playful Human-Food Interaction Research: State of the Art and Future Directions. In Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI Play ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1001-1015. 10.1145/3322276.3322325 (* joint first-authors)
- Danielle Wilde and Ferran Altarriba Bertran. 2019. Participatory Research through Gastronomy Design: A designerly move towards more playful gastronomy. International Journal of Food Design, 4(1), 3-37. 10.1386/ijfd.4.1.3_1
- Ferran Altarriba Bertran and Danielle Wilde. 2018. Playing with food: reconfiguring the gastronomic experience through play. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Food Design and Food Studies (EFOOD 2017), October 19-21, 2017, Lisbon, Portugal.