The aim of this study is, from a norm-critical approach, to find, investigate and analyse human representation in the visual culture of one preschool in order to understand if the children enrolled are represented or not. The research questions are: In what ways is there imagery of human representations in images and materials designed for play? What skin-colors and origins are dominant in the data collected?We carried out a qualitative study in the form of visual ethnography. This method allowed us to use a combination of different data collection tools such as photography and ethnographic field notes to collect our data. The photographs we took of images and material used for play, was then analysed through semiotic picture analysis.

The purpose of this thesis was to create a visual identity to the café Trädgårdscafét. This was to increase the awareness of the cafe among the population of Borlänge. To make the company's visual identity visible, we also organized a guerrilla marketing. The outcome of the guerrilla marketing were then measured by calculating the number of guests during a certain period of time and also through a survey conducted in Borlänge.Graphic material, such as a graphic identity, business cards, feel good-cards, store signs, standing information folders to place on the tables and pavement board was created. Flyers and posters were also created for the guerrilla marketing.

???In this thesis I discuss the adaption of the speaker to the audience, and suggest a radical re-imagining of both the act of adaption and the reasons why adaption is necessary. My main purpose is to introduce social complexity into what I see as the pivotal point of both classic and modernrhetoric and thereby create new possibilities for future research.I accomplish this by modifying the rhetorical concept of doxa, moving from Pierre Bourdieu's separation of doxa and habitus ? the incorporated form of shared beliefs and values ? to an integrated view based in Manuel DeLanda's use of Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's concept of the assemblage. In this way I formulate a notion of doxa that emerges from social interaction while at the same time shaping and regulating it.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how the public library communicates with young users through the library web sites. Four Swedish public library web pages for children are analysed. In the analysis the web pages are treated as a combination of semiotic resources that, communicating as a whole, hold a meaning potential. In order to identify the underlying meaning of the whole I have applied the tools of Kress' & van Leeuwen's visual social semiotics to the chosen web pages.The information value, the framing and the salience of each composition is examined and analysed, as is the size of frame, the perspective and the vertical angle of a selection of images from each web page. The results of the semiotic analysis are then discussed and related to Jochumsen et al:s four space-model and the notion of ?child perspective? and ?empowerment?.The results show that the child perspective is strongest on the web pages that represent the performative space as dominating and that empowerment is mainly represented as ?doing?, ?participating? and the ?free choice?.

The purpose of this study was to examine how local producers in the food and confectionery segment in Västernorrland, Sweden, working to communicate that the product is locally produced through its packaging design. We have chosen to look at how they work with the right packaging design because it is such an important part of the product marketing. A further aim was to examine how consumers perceive the packaging design of the locally produced products and how they consider that the packaging design communicates the product as locally produced. We have also analyzed the graphical elements contained in the locally produced product packaging through a semiotic analysis.The theoretical framework is based on theories in brand communication and Visual Communication, specializing in packaging design?s visual elements.The method used in this study is a qualitative method.

Syftet med studien var att beskriva vad personer med synnedsättning har för erfarenheter av tillgänglighet i utemiljöer och på offentliga platser. Författarna valde en intervjubaserad metod för att besvara studiens syfte där nio personer från två olika län intervjuades utifrån semistrukturerade intervjufrågor. Inklusionskriterierna för studien var att deltagarna skulle ha en synskärpa på mindre än 0,3 och vara medlem i synskadades riksförbund. Data analyserades utifrån en kvalitativ innehållsanalys som mynnade ut i tre kategorier ?tillgänglig miljö, skillnad mellan självständighet och beroende?, ?tillgänglig miljö, skillnad mellan trygghet och otrygghet? och ?allmän okunskap om tillgänglig miljö?.

The purpose of this study was to examine how local producers in the food and confectionery segment in Västernorrland, Sweden, working to communicate that the product is locally produced through its packaging design. We have chosen to look at how they work with the right packaging design because it is such an important part of the product marketing. A further aim was to examine how consumers perceive the packaging design of the locally produced products and how they consider that the packaging design communicates the product as locally produced. We have also analyzed the graphical elements contained in the locally produced product packaging through a semiotic analysis.The theoretical framework is based on theories in brand communication and Visual Communication, specializing in packaging design?s visual elements.The method used in this study is a qualitative method.

Crowdfunding is described as a facilitator for creative entrepreneurs in their gathering of funds for projects. This bachelor?s thesis  aims at finding differences in communication components found between successful and unsuccessful crowdfunding campaigns on one of the most popular platforms, Kickstarter. Through a quantitative content analysis and a rhetorical analysis of literary topoi this study suggests that there are apparent differences in usage of titles, text, visual expressions, rewards and in themes of preparation, humility as well as quality. The findings we present conclude that a campaign with a title consisting of eight words and one punctuation are more likely to succeed than other.

This master thesis examines commercial video games and their relation to the concept of immersion and realism. Games as a communicative medium is quite a new area of interest within rhetorical research in Sweden. Most of the research conducted has, however, been focused on gaming and formation on opinion ? games that explicitly tries to persuade the player, unlike commercial games that focus on entertainment, that is. But that does not mean that commercial games cannot influence us.

Although Social Democratic Memoirs comprise an extensive material, these texts have not attracted any systematic analysis as a distinct and yet varied form of textual genre. The focus in this MA-paper is the Swedish Social Democratic Memoir as a rhetoric genre. The main primary material is memoirs of the pioneer August Palm (1849?1922), the father of the nation Tage Erlander (1901?1985) and the political leader Göran Persson (1949?), published 1905, 1972?82 and 2007, respectively.The general aim is to find out what is the driving power of the memoirs and, more specifically, to shed light on the images of the party history and the history of the welfare state. The method is a comparative analysis of these texts.

The aim of this master thesis is to evaluate the performance of the content-based image retrieval system ImBrowse from a semantic point of view. Evaluation of retrieval performance is a problem in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). There are many different methods for measuring the performance of content-based image retrieval systems, but no common way for performing the evaluation. The main focus is on image retrieval regarding the extraction of the visual features in the image, from three semantic levels. The thesis tries to elucidate the semantic gap, which is the problem when the systems extraction of the visual features from the image and the user?s interpretation of that same information do not correspond.

We have investigated the visual representation of men and women in Aftonbladet?s weight site. We have made a calculation of how many of the women and the men who were portrayed smiling/ not smiling, active/passive, looking into the camera/looking away from the camera and from which camera angle the picture is taken. We also kept statistic on the gender representation of the authors of the articles.Our investigation shows that Aftonbladet?s weight site has a distinct overrepresentation of women on their pictures, but also in terms of the authors of the articles.

CASE är en förkortning för Computer Aided Software Engineering. Syftet med CASE-verktyg är att öka produktiviteten för dem som utvecklar mjukvarusystem genom att datorisera processer i deras arbete.Det finns dock problem med CASE-verktyg. Tidigare forskning pekar på att dessa ofta är komplexa i sitt utförande, att de lätt ifrågasätts om de visar sig ha buggar och att inlärnings-tröskeln är ofta hög till följd av den höga komplexiteten. Man frågar sig också hur komponenter ska vara utformade i verktygen för att fler ska använda dem. Vidare saknas nyare undersökningar med fokusering på användbarhet för CASE-verktyg och framförallt där man utgår från användaren.Vad gäller CASE-verktyg har det skett en del begreppsbyten inom området.

The thesis has been carried out in cooperation with Master Flow AB, Västervik owned by the EWEBE Group. The company produces and sells hot runner systems that are tailor made for the customers.The problem that MasterFlow AB has encountered is in the construction of complex hot runner systems in SolidWorks. With several different lengths, fronts and endcaps that builds the nozzles of the hot runner systems, is affecting the problems for MasterFlow AB. The purpose of this work is to automate the design of hot runner systems so it does not overload the CAD-system SolidWorks.To gain an understanding of the problem, there have been several studies and observations at the company, where the focus has been on how the work is done with the design of hot runner systems. By using help from the corporate management, enough information has been collected to find a solution to these problems.The implementation of design automation has been based on a flowchart that was created.

Construction production always contains different disciplines whose priorities andinterests can be very diverse. Good communication and coordination are essential tominimize misunderstandings and achieve good quality in the end result. This makesplanning a central part of the production management. In a world where conditionscan change as often as daily, being well prepared increases the opportunities to stayflexible and decrease negative effects of the changes.This study has been done in association with Skanska Foundations district North inStockholm in order to investigate how visual planning can be used in the productionmanagement to optimize the coordination and the quality.The history of Lean started at Toyota, but the concept are now spread over theworld and are used wide outside of the car industry nowadays. What?s challengingabout Lean in foundation projects is to embrace a long-term perspective and invest insolutions that are profitable in the longer term, instead of solve problems by onlytreating the symptoms.A holistic perspective is crucial in order to truly understand Lean.