In this Bachelor thesis I explore sound and room as elements in design of user interfaces, both theoretical and practical in a specific application domain, to identify some of the advantages and disadvantage associated with these elements. As application domain I studied email clients and their usage at home amongst students at Blekinge Institute of Technology. In the study I found an activity, which seems to be highly distributed in the physical room where the user is located. The activity was notification of email and could take place in an arbitrary location of the home. I then augmented this activity with ideas from my theoretical assumption about room and sound. The result was a rule-based agent for notification of email, which primarily uses sound as interaction style..

In early January 2010 the authors participated in a meeting with the chief engineer for a company in which a central part is manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCB). At this meeting it emerged that the machinery and production methods have changed substantially since the early 1990's. The spreadsheet for preliminary production time calculations by the company is today based on conditions from almost 20 years ago. The company has over the years been trying to adjust the spreadsheet template. The result of these adjustments has filled it with historical residue, something which makes the template difficult and time consuming when the primary user tries to handle it.The purpose of this study was to help the company increase its accuracy in the representation of the production times for the different PCB-based products by developing a new costing model based on an already existing but inadequate spreadsheet template. The company also expressed the wish that the new costing model would be less time consuming to work with.The methods used to achieve the goal are interviewing, participatory observations and meetings with relevant persons. The data obtained were analyzed using the theory on PCB production and visualization of data.

During the development of microwave based sensors such as radar target seekers, input signals are needed to verify the performance of the system. Therefore, a channel board has been developed by previous thesis projects at Saab Bofors Dynamics. It uses a technique called Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM). The purpose of this board is to sample and digitally store radio frequency signals in order to reconstruct them after a certain delay.The aim of this thesis project was to use the channel board named above to construct a portable instrument for generation of stimuli signals. This assignment has been divided into two tasks: firstly, to construct and put together the hardware components and secondly, to implement a graphical user interface for the instrument.

This report describes the development of an application in collaboration with Designingenjörerna AB. The company has worked for a long time with a community platform and they required an application where users can create their own unique profile representations, called Avatar Creator. An Avatar Creator is computer based application, which makes it possible to create a virtual character. The problem area behind this is that, large websites require a lot of administrative work when people upload profile pictures on different community pages. They can contain abusive material or pictures of other people rather than those who created the profile.The questions in this report are, how can an Avatar Creator help user to get a unique profile of himself? What are the advantages and disadvantages of an Avatar Creator? How to create a user-friendly application?To understand how an Avatar Creator works and get ideas to create an application, exiting Avatar Creators were reviewed on the Web.Collaborative work with Designingenjörerna AB was done to pin down the requirements for the Avatar creator application.

The technological development contributes to an increase in advertising when it comes to media. Those who are working to develop advertising are constantly looking for new ways to reach consumers in unexplored contexts. Web TV is a relatively new technique that involves the distribution of television across the Internet. This study intend to investigate how users perceive advertising appearing on web TV, and contribute to the knowledge about how advertising adapt to new media. To reach the results of this study, we used quantitative data, collected in the form of web-surveys and qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews.

The number of smartphones are constantly increasing, 2010 approximately 200 million unitswere sold globally and the figure is predicted to increase to 1 billion in 2016. The increased useof smartphones also carries many risks, for example many smartphones are connected to theInternet. This is a possible way for hackers to gain access to user devices. Smartphones are wellrepresented in research on its safety, while research on its use and users? awareness often leavesmore to be desired.

A large part of the Namibian low income population lack access to grid distributed electricity. This mean they are effectively shut out from basic functions such as lighting, information technologies and hygienic food handling. Hence, finding ways of providing affordable off-grid electricity is an important, not to say critical, task.This master thesis is an innovation and concept development project that has been carried out in cooperation with organisations in Sweden and Namibia. The purpose of the project has been to (1) develop a concept for off-grid electricity supply in Namibia and (2) to gain a deeper knowledge within the area of innovation and product development for the Base of the Pyramid population, i.e. the poorest, but largest, socio-economic part of the global population.Essential in this project has been to acquire user understanding and to identify user needs to create a foundation for developing the concept.

In this Bachelor's thesis the result from a Delphi study regarding FRBR, performed by Yin Zhang and Athena Salaba in 2007 and published in 2009 ? What is next for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records? A Delphi study ? is analyzed by qualitatively interviewing professionals active within the library and information science field in Sweden. The results are compared and possible deviations and adjustments are illuminated and discussed. The purpose of the thesis is to determine the topicality of the Delphi study in 2011 from a Swedish perspective. Conclusions made from the thesis shows that the main areas are still the same, but adjustments regarding the relative order of issues might be needed; primarily a shift of focus from theoretical to practical issues.

The aim of this paper is to investigate who the visitors are at a children's department at amain library in a larger municipality, and for what purpose they use it. We discuss: Is therea difference between various user groups, and if so, how do they differ'? Which library rolesdoes the children's department have? Does the children's department serve as a local libraryfor those who live in the immediate surroundings or as a main library for the whole municipality?The paper is based on a user survey performed in the spring of 1996 at the City Library ofGothenburg. 417 visitors and five staff members were interviewed.The children's department is used by various groups of people, from young children to seniorcitizens. The library roles are, among other things, an independent learning center and formaleducation support center.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine and analyze the discourse concerning a new public library in Stockholm. The paper further discusses how this discourse corresponds with what is written about public libraries in a number of national and international documents. To do this I have utilized the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. By using some of their instruments I have established the discourse around a number of keywords.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how some librarians working at a public library experience problems that can occur at the reference interview, slightly focusing on communication difficulties. Therefore I interviewed three librarians working at the reference desk on a daily basis. I chose to limit the study to public libraries and to the south of Sweden. My main question is: what difficulties can a librarian encounter during a reference interview and what can he/she do to treat these? In support of my main question I have three subordinated questions:What reasons can there be to a librarian not understanding a user?s information need?What methods are useful for a librarian to enhance the condition of the reference interview? What attitudes and qualities can be of use for the librarian at a difficult reference interview?For the collection of empirical data I chose to use semi-structured interviews.

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.

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.