IICADD is pleased to announce that Adrian Minano-Lozano, a Master’s student in User Experience, has won the IICADD 2024 Encouragement Award, with his dissertation entitled “Mitigating choice overload to improve accessibility of digital banking interfaces for functional illiterates.”
Left, Encouragement Award winner Adrian Minano-Lozano with IICADD jury member Gabriel Monette.
Adrian’s project description:
“Increasingly popular, digital banking interfaces are not always easy to use for the functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy affects over 50% of Quebecers aged 16 to 65. Characterized by a lack of basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills, it is often associated with low levels of digital and financial literacy – skills that are nonetheless necessary to make good use of digital banking services and thus integrate into society.”
From right, Encouragement Award winner Jonas Rey-Sierro, with IICADD jury members Inmaculada Buendia-Martinez on screen, and Gabriel Monette.
The second joint winner of the Encouragement Prize was Jonas Rey-Sierro, a student in the Master’s program in management and sustainable development, for his integration project entitled “Social Economy Embedding Circular Economy: Theory, Practice, and Potential—Global Partnership Database Creation and Dissemination”.
Jonas’ project description
“Circular economy is a widespread concept in government organization and business. It is proposed as an alternative solution to build a sustainable future. Most of the research shows the potential to this model for technological development and business growth. However, there is a lack of information about how it impacts the social and cultural aspect of an organization. This is particularly the case with hybrid cooperation including business and market as well as association style and democratic governance. An international research partnership has been created to better understand how cooperative can participate to a circular economy transition. A survey has been distributed in 11 countries to COOP that has been identified as using circular strategy and business models as defined in Quebec typology. The data collected included a description of the COOP, questions about the type of governance, financial structure, technology in use and circular business model and strategy. The data will be collected during the spring of 2024 on the online platform Qualtrics.”
The jury, made up of Professor Inmaculada Buendía Martínez and Gabriel Monette, teacher and postdoctoral researcher, made its decision based on the quality and relevance of the two projects.