Eliana Santiago is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Drawing and Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto. Her research operates at the intersection of design, drawing, computational environments, and human-centered design, with a focus on mediated interaction and embodied experience in technologically augmented contexts. She is the Principal Investigator of the FCT PEX project S.iX (DOI: 10.54499/2023.11224.PEX) and a member of BTL (DOI: 10.54499/2023.14448.PEX). The former explores inclusive digital environments through embodied interaction, while the latter reframes friction as a deliberate design strategy within the user-centered design paradigm in interaction design research.
She is an integrated researcher and member of the ID+ Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture, and a collaborator at the i2ADS Research Institute, where she works within the research programme Computation, Hybrid Practices and Culture, a collective of designers, artists, educators, and media researchers. She also maintains an active practice in communication, editorial, interface, and computational design. With a strong interest in UX and UI, human-computer interaction, and XR environments, her research is situated across the fields of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, with an emphasis on computational design (UX, UI, AR, VR), design education, game design, and design for health, approached through perspectives such as more-than-human design, extreme aesthetics, embodied constraints, extreme users, and design friction. She is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of the Master’s in Interaction Design and Computational Media at FBAUP, where she teaches Research Methodologies in Interaction Design and promotes an exploratory, laboratory-based project approach, fostering a critical perspective on computational and interaction design in artistic, industrial, and research contexts.