As self-service technologies become more common in service provisions, a deeper understanding is needed of how customer satisfaction is affected by automated service encounters. Drawing from theories of customer satisfaction, human interaction, and the dynamics of complex service provisions, the differences between automated and interpersonal service encounters in the initial part of a service provision are examined in terms of customers? evaluation of the service encounter itself, overall satisfaction, as well as the service encounter?s impact on global evaluations and evaluations of other non-dependant service encounters. The study was performed on people travelling by air on Swedish domestic routes. Passengers were asked to evaluate the airline?s performance on different attributes of the air travel they had undertaken, as well as to form an overall evaluation of the service.

Discussions about the sustainable city are now all over the world and many believe that the solutions are merely technical. But what gives the city its character is what is happening in the public places. It is these spaces that bring the people together. Design is the key to sustainable urban spaces. We must produce public places that reflect our society.

The last years trends of increasing globalisation and the decreasing importance of the nationstate has led to rising flows of travellers and information throughout the globe. This has affected the competition between destinations; they are now competing in a global market. The importance of placemarketing and representing a place identity, is today essential to attract customers from around the world. The purpose of this essay was to examine how Iceland as a place is represented through the photographs in horse tourism. The research questions asked were: How is the Icelandic landscape represented in photographs? How is people and horses represented in the landscape? And how can the horse be analysed as a part of the Icelandic landscape? The method used for research was image-analysis, a qualitative approach where horse tourism-websites and photographs on these websites were strategically selected.

The aim of this work is to give an example of how archaeoacoustics can broaden our understanding of archaeological remains and to further contribute to the almost non-existing research of ringing stones. With a theoretical discussion about sound from three different perspectives and by means of using different kinds of analysis, this essay will show that there are unknown relations between the three known ölandic ringing stones and the cultural landscape of Öland. Possible patterns in the placement of the stones and the possibility of the sound in this soundscape will be investigated. The essay will also suggest a resonant stone typology and discuss the necessity of one. Finally, the intention is also to shed new light upon the discussion on what the uses of the ringing stones might have been..

This paper examines the opportunities of landscape architect students to integrate with other students which are related to the landscape architects vocational field during their education. It also involves a discussion about the profession of landscape architects and the view of landscape architect students concerning who they will work with in their professional career. Six qualitative interviews were carried out to identify how one work with student exchanges, both within the landscape architecture education program and in voluntary forums during the students' leisure time. The interviewees have experiences of different student exchanges and different approach to landscape architecture education at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Alnarp. During the interviews, it emerged that the number of exchanges for different reasons steadily has declined in recent years. At the same time, the interviewed conceded that exchanges are important to prepare students for their professional career. An electronic survey was sent to all landscape architecture students at SLU Alnarp.

How does the criticism of landscape architecture in Swedish professional journals look today? Does it exist at all? What is criticism and what is its purpose? These questions have been the starting point for this degree project. I have found a lot of different answers among journals, books and websites, as well as in interviews with five persons that all have a relation to the landscape architecture criticism in different ways. These answers may look a bit disjointed at first, but are at a closer examination pointing in the same direction ? that the criticism of landscape architecture projects hardly exists today.

My purpose with this thesis has been tostudy the intersection between Landscapearchitecture and Land Art. They both relateto the landscape in some way whetherit is to the urban landscape or thenatural landscape.What tangent points are there betweenthese two subjects, and can you learnsomething of the artists approach to thelandscape?Land Art is an art movement that began inthe late 60?s, what links are there to thecurrent landscape?Last summer, I travelled around the U.S.for a month and visited the three classicLand Art projects. Lightning Field in NewMexico, by Walter De Maria, Sun Tunnels inUtah, by Nancy Holt and the Spiral Jetty,also in Utah, by Robert Smithson.The sites where visited from half a day upto 24 hours and was described and analyzedwith text and photographs.To visit these sites has been crucial formy thesis and will affect my future workas a landscape architect. The use of themethod has been a thought of mine for along time, particularly to analyze ordescribe a landscape with images.

My purpose with this thesis has been tostudy the intersection between Landscapearchitecture and Land Art. They both relateto the landscape in some way whetherit is to the urban landscape or thenatural landscape.What tangent points are there betweenthese two subjects, and can you learnsomething of the artists approach to thelandscape?Land Art is an art movement that began inthe late 60?s, what links are there to thecurrent landscape?Last summer, I travelled around the U.S.for a month and visited the three classicLand Art projects. Lightning Field in NewMexico, by Walter De Maria, Sun Tunnels inUtah, by Nancy Holt and the Spiral Jetty,also in Utah, by Robert Smithson.The sites where visited from half a day upto 24 hours and was described and analyzedwith text and photographs.To visit these sites has been crucial formy thesis and will affect my future workas a landscape architect. The use of themethod has been a thought of mine for along time, particularly to analyze ordescribe a landscape with images.

In this essay, I explore the history of the ideas that have shaped the profession of landscape architecture, in a Swedish context. To this purpose, I have sampled the professional debate on landscape architecture at four points in time. These are the years around 1890, 1930, 1970 and 2010. Drawing on G N Brandt (1920), I make the distinction between two arguably crucial approaches, i . e., naturalism and formalism. By identifying these perspectives, and by dividing the arguments of each time period according to this classification, I am able to compare the course of the debate over time. I take on the task through hermeneutics.

Every business is subject to service failures. The process of correcting these failures and turning disappointed customers back into happy ones is called service recovery. This is particularly important in the hotel business, where there are many moments of truth where customers may become dissatisfied. To further complicate things, service recovery is a process where you may have to correct errors of others - people beyond your control. The research field is relatively new and there are no turn-key solutions as to how to systematically work with service recovery.

The aim with this study is to identify and discuss discourses in public service policy documents to clarify that public service policy is political and not self-evident. The study's theoretical as well as methodological starting point is the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, which ontological position is that all meaning is constructed by discourses. In the studied material, two discourses have been identified in policy concerning the content in public service media. The responsibility-discourse construct meanings of what content the policy wants to see in public service media and in the quality-discourse meanings of how the content should be is constructed. Public service policy is consistent over the period that has been studied and the study shows that there is consensus in the parliament about the regulation of the content in public service media.

In this paper I have sought a suitable level of abstraction in my models describing the landscape; the models are made to be viewed from eyelevel. Because of the spectator being ?in the model? the objects included need a certain degree of realism. I have sought what is needed in the model to be able to comprehend that the model is showing a landscape. Some details might be unnecessary.

Place is on the one hand a commonsense everyday word with diversely connotative meanings, and on the other a contested concept with different interpretations across a broad range of academic disciplines and discourses. This thesis researches theories of place and their implications for the theory and design practice of landscape architecture. Responding to problems of insufficient theoretical grounding and inconsistent use of the concept of place within the discipline presently, it argues the need for a theory of place better articulated in relation to landscape architecture. It seeks to contribute to such theory formation by drawing on ideas from related disciplines ? tracing diverse understandings of place beyond the commonsense meanings of the word and into the deeper reaches of place theory as tools to explain physical, social and spiritual aspects of the environment, and human relationships with it.

This degree project is based on my personal relation and engagement to the small-scaled cultural landscape. My viewpoint is the village Torpa in Östergötland. My observations of the changes and development together with the stories of the village people has lead me to the questioning about the future prospects of the small-scaled cultural landscape. The rationalization of the society and our urban culture has lead to big changes in the cultural landscape and the people have reduced to a small crowd. Fewer and fewer hands are managing the small-scaled cultural landscape and fewer and fewer young people have connection to this kind of landscape and its management.

A lot of habitats have declined or disappeared as the old cultural landscape changed to the modern agricultural landscape of today. Places such as power line corridors, racing tracks, gravel pits and military training sites have become refuges for many species associated with the old cultural landscape. These sites have been exposed to ecological disturbances that create the same type of habitats that were found in the old cultural landscape.The military training sites in Sweden has an impressive diversity of species. Disturbances from the military exercises have created habitats that are important for a wide range of species.The purpose of this thesis is to study some of the ecological disturbances occurring in the military training sites of the Swedish Armed Forces and examine how they affect different types of habitats. The thesis explains through litterateur and field studies the reason to the rich biodiversity often found at military training sites.