In this Bachelor Thesis (20 p.), we present the history and development of "Intelligent Houses", and most important- explore some of the future possibilities in this area. The project has been carried out through an interdisciplinary cooperation between three different educations at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. By conducting a dialogue with various actors with different professions, we have been trying to identify needs within the concept of "Intelligent Houses", were the end user is not only the tenant or homeowner. Through Participatory Design methods, such as a Future Workshop, we have brought the users together to discuss their own and each others needs and hindrances in their respective work practice, and how intelligent house technology could improve their work conditions. We have also been testing a highly sophisticated CO/CO2/Moisture/Temperature/Enthalpy multi-sensor & controller, originally developed for regulating indoor climate systems.

The aim of this study is to find information about what to do when riding arena footings are worn-out. Especially, the surface layer of riding arena footings is very interesting because of its importance of giving grip in every step for the horse, as well as shock ab-sorption. Generally, surface layers are containing several different parts in order to achieve desirable properties. These different parts can consist of organic material or in-organic material (mostly gravel). Gravel and many other materials in the top-layer are environmental friendly, and therefore, easy to get rid of.

Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978) is the most important reference point in the post-colonial theory and describes how the West is dominant over the Orient. There is a clear distinction between "us" and "the other" and the purpose of this study is that, from a postcolonial perspective, focusing on Said's theoretical concepts "the other" and "discourse", examining how two foreign-born people with ethnic backgrounds living in the same place, are looking at themselves, at other foreign-born and native Swedes. My questions to answer this are; ?what are the concepts of "the other" and "discourse" and is it possible to use these concepts to examine how foreign-born people are looking at themselves, at other foreign-born and native Swedes in a specific location??, ?who is "the other" in a place where there are almost as many native Swedes as foreign-born??, and ?how do these two foreign-born people with ethnic backgrounds perceive Norrliden as a place and what effect has that place had on their identity?? I have used a post-colonial philosophical ground and a qualitative approach, focusing on two different interviews with two men, living in Norrliden. In Norrliden almost 50% of the inhabitants are foreign-born were both of the interview-persons are feeling safe and secure.

Automatic trimmerhead is an examination project for making an automatic trimmerhead for grass trimmers with the user and functionality in focus. Our perception is that a happy user is a user who can pick up his or her trimmer, use it and put it back to its place when the job is done. It should not be necessary to interrupt work and perform maintenance on the machine just to make it work as promised.The project has been made in collaboration with the company Husqvarna, which is one of the biggest actors dealing with garden machinery on the market. Together we determined the project goal, ?To invent, construct and test a brand new concept for how an automatic trimmerhead can look and function?.At this day there are several different automatic trimmerheads on the market, both semi and fully automatic.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how librarians working in academic libraries are experiencing the reference situation from a pedagogical point of view, by applying a theoretical framework consisting of learning strategies and their different characteristics, to qualitative interviews. Other goals are to elucidate the fact that learning takes place every day at libraries during the reference situation and that this work must be seen as ?one of the most important activities that takes place at the library?, using the words from one of the interviewed librarians, but also to make place for more discussions regarding pedagogic and library work. This is done by posing questions about knowledge, learning, information literacy, communication, the reference encounter, the roles of the librarian, policy and also architectural aspects of the reference situation. The interviews were taped, transcribed and categorized according to the earlier mentioned areas of interest.

The object with this work was to create a simple feeding program for beef cows. Another object was that I could learn more about the properties and functions of Excel and Visual Basic. I used parts of a program I designed a few years ago. This old program was neither user friendly nor had it an appealing layout. Initially I decided how I wanted the new program to appear and on which foundation it should be built. I designed various forms into a spread sheet, such as lists and multiple choice buttons. Using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) I could create macros, which used the information chosen in the lists and with the multiple choices to calculate the feeding requirement or the feeding plan.

AbstractThe aim of the study was to describe district nurses experiences meeting intimate of cancer patients in home care. The study had a qualitative approach with a descriptive design. The sample consisted of ten district nurses employed in primary health care, working in emergency duty in a district in the Middle of Sweden. The results are presented from the two categories; to communicate and being competent, which was formulated to one theme. The theme ?Being safe in one´s professional role, being aware of possibilities and difficulties when encountering intimates in home care?.

The purpose of this thesis is to create opportunities for an efficient interchange of information between humans and technology, especially for the skilled user, and put the designprincipal for informative structures and features into practice. Informative structures and features in a large number of information items helps the peripheral visual system to automatically capture knowledge through logical patterns.A field experiment was done to evaluate if informative structures and features, implicate efficient human information-processing, even in a small study. The results was ambiguous because the quantitative part of the investigation didn?t show any significant differences, whereas the qualitative showed that people prefer a dynamic document with a high degree of informative structures and features over a dynamic document with a low degree of informative structures and features. Even if this study was inconsistent, probably because to few subjects where used, the implication of the research that?s behind it is solid.

Användarskapat innehåll, eller UGC från engelskans User Generated Content, har med teknikens utveckling blivit allt mer populärt på webbtidningar. Det ses som en konkurrensfördel men kan även innebära risker för tidningen, inte minst kostnadsmässigt. Det blir därför viktigt att satsa på UGC som läsarna vill ha, men vad detta innebär är inte ett välutforskat ämne. Denna uppsats ämnar svara på vilket användarskapat innehåll läsare av webbtidningar föredrar, samt varför de föredrar just detta. Med utgångspunkt i en litteraturstudie identifierades fem aspekter som kan hjälpa till att beskriva UGC.

The purpose of this essay is to function as a guide in the future development of the Umeå University Library?s webbsite by examining its users? web experiences as well as their web surfing behaviours. In this essay, a number of opinions in usability and accessibility coming from writers and organisations are presented. Using the writers? theories and previous research, along with the results from the evalutation, the essay attempts to explain the behaviour of users when they get in touch with technology, aswell as what the web users perceive as user friendly.

The flow of information in road vehicles intensifies as new techniques develop. Informationsources such as cell phones, navigation equipment and radios demand the driver?s attentionwhile he or she must stay focused on the road to perform a safe driving. Today the visualinformation inside the vehicle is mostly located on the dashboard, which forces the driver tolook down when shifting attention between the environment outside and the informationinside the vehicle. One way to avoid this is to useHead-up Display (HUD), a technique thatprojects information in the visual field of the user.This master thesis has been performed in cooperation with Scania CV AB, a world leadingtruck producer.

The aim of this Master Thesis is to examine how the national intranet at Nordea serves the organisation as a channel of information and communication. The intranets of today, have partially or completely come to replace other channels of information within larger organisations, and the intranet has become an increasingly important issue to the communicational process of organisations. To address the problem stated, qualitative interviews was accomplished with several employees at a department at Nordea. The achieved result reflects how the intranet supports variable everyday end-user situations. The result shows an intranet that is sparsely used in comparison to other channels of communication such as colleagues.

The purpose of this bachelor?s thesis is to examine how students at Högskolan i Borås experience the web-scale discovery service Summon, based on the theoretical model of ?The Five Dimensions of Usability?, defined by Whitney Quesenbery. The study aims to answer the following research questions: How do the students execute search assignments in the Summon interface? How intuitive and easy to navigate is the system from a user perspective? What are the students? opinions about Summon, regarding usability?Five students with varying information seeking skills are asked to perform search assignments during controlled observation, followed by semi-structured interviews. Our findings are presented in the context of previous research and show correspondence with the results of related studies.

This Masters thesis in Library and Information Science has the title The New Information Desks at Malmö Public Library . During the rebuilding of the library in Malmö a new information desk was developed. This desk differs to a great extent from conventional information desks used in libraries. The information desk is triangular with rounded edges which allows the librarian and the user of the library to work side by side without any physical barriers. The aim of this thesis is to explore the requirements for the information desks formulated by the library and how they are perceived by the librarians and the users of the library.

Denna rapport beskriver processen av skapandet av en webbaserad säljpresentation av en av företaget PROSK8?s planerade produkter. Målet med presentationen är att skapa nyfikenhet och förtroende genom visuell design och ska fungera som ett verktyg och stöd för företagets presentatörer vid möten med investerare. Centralt för denna process är upplevelsedesign, varför utgångspunkten för arbetsflödet bygger på Jesse James Garretts modell av ?The elements of user experience?.