The design process of an interaction design student is mostly collaborative and computer oriented. Based on this, it?s hard to believe that we have not yet found a tool that will facilitate our needs. With this in mind, which elements do we need to promote collaboration in a virtual design process? This thesis will include design processes, collaboration, creativity and virtual awareness, amongst others.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how librarians talk about users in social media. Using a method of discourse analysis based on Ernesto Laclau?s and Chantal Mouffe?s theoretical concepts it seeks to answer the following questions: How do librarians describe and comment on users in social media? In which contexts do librarians talk about users in social media? Which ideas of the relationship between the librarians and the users do the user discourses present?The study focuses on a Facebook page called ?Arga Bibliotekstanten? (The Angry Library Lady) and all its posts and comments during the period of January to June 2013. This is an ?open? page available for anyone to follow; at the time of the study it had approximately 1800 ?followers? and 4000 ?friends?, both librarians and users.The results show that librarians talk about the users in a variety of ways, but mainly concerning money, behavior and task.

LIBRIS is a national library search engine offering information about 6 million books, articles, dissertations and other materials held by Swedish university libraries, research libraries and public libraries. In December 2007 a new version of LIBRIS was launched, developed with focus on usability, simplicity and accessibility. This thesis examines how the new LIBRIS is used, what is working well and what could be improved and also what the users think of LIBRIS. The following report is based partly on a study of usability and partly on a series of tests where librarians, scientists, students and developers have executed a number of tasks while thinking aloud. The users also participated in an interview.

The aim of this master thesis is to study if the websites of the Swedish public libraries are accessible to all people. According to the library law all people must have access to the public libraries and their information services. Today, when the Internet is one of the largest sources of information, it is important that all people, including those with different kind of disabilities, children, elderly, immigrants and people with old technical equipment, have access to the public libraries websites.We have in this study considered the graphic user interface, the language, the structure and the navigation possibilities at ten public library websites. We have from a checklist of our own, based upon the opinion of different experts such as Jacob Nielsen and Tommy Sundström, investigated the websites.The main finding of our study is that the websites are generally accessible even thou we found a lack of accessible for immigrants. Most of the websites had some pages in English, but none hade all pages in this language.

This Masters thesis investigates user education at academic libraries. The increased demand on students to keep themselves updated in the information society of today urges libraries to develop their user education, concerning both content and teaching strategies. The aim of this study is to examine user education at academic libraries, and the approach of librarians in their teaching. The research questions address how librarians implement the user education and what they focus on. We also want to explore what differences and similarities there are between the user educations, and if anything could be further developed within them.

This study focuses on the influence a user may have over his or her welfare service, personal assistance. A county, an assistance firm and a user cooperative are compared with the thesis that the organisation that surrounds the users shapes the possibilities the user have to influence his or her personal assistance. There are questions that try to answer if there are outspoken social goals within each organisation. Questions regarding influence of the user when she or he is choosing the assistance provider and the users possibility to influence and his or her power to decide who and when anyone works as an assistant are asked..

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate how academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students. International students are a growing usergroup in Swedish academic libraries. The study?s main research question is:- How do academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students?The study was performed with a phenomenographic methodological approach where seven qualitative interviews with academic librarians were conducted.

The purpose of this project was to create a system which can handle issues, with other words an issue tracking system. The system must create issues, assign issues to a specific user and list all issues for each user. On top of that, each issue should have a log where users can log whatever they want.My part of this project was to implement a client which can fulfill this basic criteria (and a bit more if possible), and communicate with the server which has procedures to be executed by the client.This system is based on Android and has it purpose to be used by mobile devices which support Android. ?Ichnaea? as the system is called, is meant to be used by companies to have human interaction through the network..

This study concerns paratransit service in a relatively small municipality in Sweden. The aim of this study is to describe the user's experience of paratransit service. The question formulation is mainly built around the user's experience of paratransit service and their view on what impact paratransit service has on their lives. The empirical data consists of ten interviews with ten different paratransit service users with ages ranging from 25-95 years. The data has mainly been analyzed through concepts of independence, empowerment and trust. The result of this study shows that paratransit service in many ways can be described as a crucial part of the users' lives.

The study presented here is about how to make the special needs user who has a profound intellectual disability and additional disabilities more involved in their implementation plan. Based on a life story interview the study aims at analyzing perceptions of procedures to enhance special needs users? influence. The method used in this study was a qualitative research approach as an overall approach in order to use a narrative method where life history is the method. The focus has been to study a part of an individual life history - a specific domain in the life of the interviewee?s working career.

The aim of this study was to examine the aspect of power in the relationship between the personal assistant and the disabled person he or she works with (the user). The study was based on interviews with five personal assistants who worked for private companies that provided personal assistance. Seven themes were identified and discussed. These were: the users amount of control over the assistance given, the workplace environment, the working conditions, the organization of personal assistance by private companies, the assistants recourses and usage of power and the users participation in chores. To analyze these themes I used Foucault's theory of power and the perspective of Human Resource.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate 7 different search strategies for content-based image retrieval with respect to retrieval effectiveness. The strategies are based on different levels of resolution implemented by the Haar transformation. The result of the study shows an improvement in both mean average precision and mean recall in strategies based on lower levels of resolution..

The aim of this essay is to examine three separate Swedish public libraries and their respective websites on the grounds of the usability sciences. I firstly had to summarize the main properties of the usability-field in order to gain an extended knowledge of its purposes and possible usage for today?s library systems. I was then able to apply the extended knowledge in the examination of the three library websites and the purpose of determining whether or not they were designed according to the standards set by the usability-sciences.Usability is a rather new science that deals with the dissection and examination of computer-based systems, in order to find the key components that make systems user-friendlier. With user needs being the main focus of its research, usability tries to meet all the different needs of the modern user and construct systems that are less system-centered and more user-centered.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.

The ability to tackle NP-hard problems has been greatly extended by the introduction of Metaheuristics (see Blum & Roli (2003)) for a summary of most Metaheuristics, general problem-independent optimisation algorithms extending the hill-climbing local search approach to escape local minima. One of these algorithms is Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenco et al., 2002; Stützle, 1999a, p. 25ff), a recent easy to implement but powerful algorithm with results comparable or superior to other state-of-the-art methods for many combinatorial optimisation problems, among them the Traveling Salesman (TSP) and Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). ILS iteratively samples local minima by modifying the current local minimum and restartinga local search porcedure on this modified solution. This thesis will show how ILS can be implemented for MSA.