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.

The main focus of this study are the textile prints created by Astrid Sampe (1909-2002). Her fabrics can tell us more about her than a biography ever could. They can reveal how we experience patterns, why we are attracted to them and how our preferences can evolve over time. This study examines four different patterns, and the thesis aims to define Sampe and her textile prints using three different theories and a formal aesthetic analysis. Modernistic and postmodernism theories are relevant when explaining the period where the fabrics were created and how Sampe's ideas were conceived during her lifetime.

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.

Texo Application has created robots that they call for satellites; with these you can feed in storage pallets into a satellite storage. Satellite storages consist of channels in height (e.g.3 to 8 pieces) and width (e.g.3 to 100 pieces). Channels can be different long (e.g. 5 to 200 pallets). At deposit of a storage pallet the truck insert the satellite in a channel and then the pallet, the pallet is driven into the channel until it reaches another pallet or the other end.

This paper describes the process of producing avatars for Jiddr. Today, social media surrounds the lives of youth, and communication via the Internet is an everyday occurrence for most people. Jiddr is an app that was created to give youths a platform for engaging with adults and other youths. It is a moderated forum which gives young people the opportunity to come i contact with adult role models who are knowledgable within various subject areas. On Jiddr, users are anonymous, and this is something I have placed much importance on during the design process.

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.

What impact and effects are created by the placement of an international ranking? Could it be that a top rank is detrimental to an entire country's efforts to fight corruption?This bachelor thesis in political science is about Swedish corruption. In essence, so questioning the Transparency International's indexed rankings that placed Sweden in third place. Issues concern since if the third placement has created nonchalance and a careless mentality in Swedish government and in particular in the municipal operations. Research results show that Transparency International's rankings have low validity and low reliability and that the government is not acting sufficiently to prevent and fight corruption.

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.

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.

This project has created a web-application for the service technicians at the paper plant Gruvön. The project was outsourced to the IT-company Sogeti.The application visualizes information about reparation-work of the equipment at the paper plant. The displayed information is work-orders, the status of the work-orders and errors. It is also possible to see the costs and hours spent on reparation-work.. The work-orders and related information is stored in a relational database.The application is created mainly for web-browsers in mobile-phones and tablets.

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.

Namibia, southern Africa, suffers from an energy shortage and is therefore facing severalchallenging problems. The use of firewood as fuel for cooking is common in the whole countryand has negative consequences for health and the environment. This work have focused ondeveloping a solar baking oven, calledSunbaker, adapted for Namibian families needs forbaking. The development was based on classic solar cooking limitations, specific needs forNamibia and to have a feasible manufacturability.The project started with a theoretical study in Sweden where different solar cookers, informationregarding Namibia, technical aspects and end user aspects were studied. To assess the need for asolar baking oven aMinor Field Study took place in Namibia during eight weeks in July toSeptember 2009 and resulted in a product design specification.

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.