Articles by sabrina scuri
CLIMAEXTREMO: A New Risk Indicator for the Health Risk to Building Occupants during Extreme Weather Events in Portugal
Sustainability, 2024
Portugal is the country in Europe where the death rate in winter and summer has the highest corre... more Portugal is the country in Europe where the death rate in winter and summer has the highest correlation with outdoor temperatures. The Portuguese National Institute of Public Health Ricardo Jorge has developed a national warning system for heat waves called ICARO, which has been in place since 1999 (and is the oldest in Europe). However, it presents some limitations, namely, the low spatial resolution (five regions in Portugal’s mainland), the low temporal forecasting period (one day), and the fact that it was only accessible to health authorities until very recently. This work describes the development of a new public dashboard that uses a new early warning index for extreme weather events, the CLIMAEXTREMO index, which extends the current warning system by improving the current forecasting models for risk by integrating new sources of public data and increasing the spatial and time resolution of the warnings to the municipality or the parish level. The new index is a combination of a new model to estimate the relative mortality increase (updating the model used in ICARO) together with a model of the indoor temperature of building archetypes for all municipalities and a vulnerability index that considers socio-demographic economic indicators. This work discusses the results of the new risk indicator for the heat waves that occurred in Portugal at the end of June and mid-August 2023, and it shows that the index was able to indicate a high risk for the municipalities that had an increase in the number of deaths during that period.
A Questionnaire for Assessing Immersive Websites
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2022
Web-immersion – i.e., a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption engendered by the conte... more Web-immersion – i.e., a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption engendered by the content and interactive features of a website - plays an important role in our modern, digital world. Yet, this topic has received little attention from design and HCI scholars. The lack of tools to assess and measure immersion in the Web may severely limit our ability to understand the nature of such experience, thereby constraining future research in the area. To address this issue, we designed a questionnaire for assessing immersive websites and conducted a preliminary evaluation on it. In this article, we outline the questionnaire design and report on findings from a preliminary study conducted to analyse its reliability and validity. Moreover, we present results from Factor Analysis performed to investigate the dimensionality of the instrument. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, along with limitations of the study and future work.
Strategic Design Research Journal, 2015
Nowadays the relationship between people, culture and territories is changing. On the one hand, g... more Nowadays the relationship between people, culture and territories is changing. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on the value of cultural heritage and local identity as means for social cohesion and economic growth. On the other hand, experience-based tourism is growing and, consequently, it increases the need of an experience-based communication strategy. This paper explores the contribution of communication design to tourism promotion and the enhancement of cultural identity. It will deal with the topic of communicative access, which is meant as the result of a visual translation of several tourist information. Therefore, it focuses on the design process of digital communication formats aimed at providing "experiential" representations of the territory and its identity. To explain the process, a research project carried out by the authors will be presented as a case study.
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Articles by sabrina scuri