In Sweden there are laws and recommendations from The National Board of Health and Welfare about the importance of a user's involvement in and possibility of influencing services directed at them. Even with such good intentions the same board reports that it is hard to know if people experience that they do. The purpose of my study was to examine how professionals can use their knowledge to help users increase their sense of influence in services that they use. My focus has been on adults with neuropsychiatric disabilities within the autistic spectra, such as Asperger syndrome, and on the professionals working with them. The specific problem among people with neuropsychiatric disabilities is a lack of social skills.

The current planning philosophy is based on a political utopic modernism founded during the first part of the 20th century. The focus is, in planning a defined area, to maximize the internal efficiency and to create a competitivesociety. During the latter part of the former century globalization changed the context, thus creating the need for a new way of approaching physical planning. This paper shows that the historical and philosophicalmetaphor of flow can be applied to meet the demands in the global city. It also shows how the edge, as where interaction takes place, is an important part of the content that has to be defined.

Immersion is a construct that measures how deeply engrossed a user is with any mediated situation. In the field of game design, immersion is a significant aspect of what makes a game enticing, and as such it is of pivotal importance to create and maintain it to keep the player's mind off the real world while inside the confines of a game framework. According to the GameFlow theory, it is one of seven key tenets of evaluating and implementing a successful game design. Yet, certain multiplayer online games are designed in a fashion that in some cases seem to break immersion, where the player is frequently put out of action, sometimes for minutes on end. In this study, using online questionnaires, we discover that players, despite claims otherwise, seem to be in several ways affected negatively by this breaking of immersion.

Immersion is a construct that measures how deeply engrossed a user is with any mediated situation. In the field of game design, immersion is a significant aspect of what makes a game enticing, and as such it is of pivotal importance to create and maintain it to keep the player's mind off the real world while inside the confines of a game framework. According to the GameFlow theory, it is one of seven key tenets of evaluating and implementing a successful game design. Yet, certain multiplayer online games are designed in a fashion that in some cases seem to break immersion, where the player is frequently put out of action, sometimes for minutes on end. In this study, using online questionnaires, we discover that players, despite claims otherwise, seem to be in several ways affected negatively by this breaking of immersion.

Applications for mobile devices, also known as apps, are today the backbone of a huge market where the company Apple is one of the key players. Apple develops, among other things, handheld electronic devices, which are powered by the operating system iOS. Through iOS, millions of customers get access to Apple?s App Store.During a period of two months, an app in the form of a game has been developed for iOS in the programming language Objective-C. The user of the app is presented intuitive menus and interactive graphical objects that seemingly obey physical laws.

The electric car has existed for over a century and producers has tried to commercialize it earlier but has not succeeded. In recent years, however, a change occurred that may be significant for the electric car and it is now to commercialize in the market of passenger cars. The technology has in recent years elaborated as more car manufacturers have started to invest in development in the subject field. This thesis aims to compile an action plan for the development of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles in Uppsalahem ABs residential areas. It is based on a survey of different residential areas and a survey of charging infrastructure.

The aim of this essay was to describe and analyse the use of snuff as a social activity. By accomplishing eight qualitative interviews with snuff-users I wanted to get a glimpse into their relationship to the snuff and find out in which situations and frames of mind the snuff-use alter. I also wanted to find out if age, class or gender has any affect in snuff-using. The interviews were analysed in a sociological perspective with help from Erving Goffmans and Joseph Gusfields ideas, among others. I found out that each snuff-user creates his own rituals and routines, but there are factors in daily life, which can change the use of snuff.

This report was performed in order to evaluate a new technological measure and focuses generally on a heat pump system to a HWC-washing machine. The client is Asko Appliances AB, a company well known for its environmentally friendly products. The goal of this study was to improve the energy efficiency of a washing machine by combining a heat pump device to the heater of the wash water, in order to reduce the energy consumed for heating the water. Besides reducing the energy consumption in heating the water, the washing machine was required to meet low noise and short operating time specifications. For that purpose, nine trials in three test series have been carried out.

Some word processing programs save information that not all users of the program are aware of. This information consists of a number of things. Example of that is who the writer of the document is, the time it took to write it and where on the computer the document is saved. Text that has been changed or removedcan also be saved. This information is not shown in the program and the user will therefore not be aware of its existence.

Thousands of people all over the world suffer from injuries that temporary affects their ability to speak or inother ways communicate. A very common procedure for persons that suffer from some kind of breathingproblem in the higher parts of the neck is called tracheotomy. This prevents the patient from speaking whenno air passes the vocal cords. There have been many studies done to understand how these patientsexperience this period. The results are consistent, the patients often feel fear, frustration and worries aboutthe future.Tobii Technology develops a technique called eyetracking wich enables persons to control a computer with theeyes.

This report covers the thesis done by mechanical engineering at the engineering program at the University of Halmstad. Student Work Development of packaging in the food industry includes 15 credits and has performed over 20 weeks in spring 2009. The thesis work is a compulsory part of education and aimed at the student must apply the knowledge it has given during training in a project related to reality. Student work has been carried out in cooperation with Hanson & Möhringen AB and the project's main objective was to develop an environmentally friendly packaging to their brand Falk Salt. When salt is one of the world's cheapest commodity was packing all the costs have to be as low as possible.

The subject of this bachelors degree project is an interior layout for road ambulances.Landstinget Västernorrland (LVN) wanted a layout concept that would be used to com- municate their design intentions to the ambulance producers during their purchase process.Designing ambulance interiors is an extremely complex process since there so many fac- tors to take into consideration. It ?s not just about taking the equipment and place it where there is space left in the cabin. You have to start with the user in focus and the tasks that are to be performed in the ambulance environment.It ishard to find design solutions that will fit 100% of the ambulance personnel?s working routines for 100% of the tasks.

Working with a three-dimensional shape that adjusts light seemed exciting. Venetian blinds became a basis and source of inspiration in my project. What is a Venetian blind? I arrived at the de?nition ?a surface of angleble pieces for sun adjustment?. From that simpli?ed meaning I started making sketches of what an alternative model could look like.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the usage of and attitudes towards electronic books among graduate and PhD students at Karlstad University. The main questions are: How do graduate and PhD students use electronic books? To what extent are electronic books used compared to printed books? To find the answers, a user study was carried out at Karlstad University library. The results show that a majority of the respondents are aware of the possibility to use electronic books but prefer to use printed ones if they have to choose. Many respondents also complained about difficulties reading a text on the computer screen.

This study is about language use in text messaging. In this study there are 338 text messages: 206 of them written by girls and 132 written by boys. The informants in the study are 16 years old and they live in the countryside on the outskirts of a small town in southern Sweden. The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristic linguistic features in the messages, in order to determine what significant meaning an emoticon such as a smiley brings to a text and further, to explore what speech acts smileys occur in.The results show that the language in the messages is a mix of spoken and written language. The characteristic features that were found in the messages were short sentences, onomatopoetic expressions, words written in capital letters, English expressions and use of smileys.