This paper presents an exploratory work on using Large Language Models (LLM) in User Experience (UX) design. Previous research shows that UX designers struggle to envision novel designs and to prototype with AI as a design material. We set out to investigate the question of how designers can be sensitized to LLMs, and their implications for the professional role of UX designers. Using autobiographical design, we develop a prototype of a digital workspace (the “PromptBoard”) for designing and prototyping chatbots utilizing ChatGPT. A design sprint workshop with six participants is performed, in an effort to answer the research questions by working with the PromptBoard. Discussions and participant-designed artifacts are analysed using thematic analysis. Findings include that participants are able to express design ideas and successfully create chatbots using the tool but express a conflicting sense of lacking creativity or ownership of the results. Implications to the field of UX design are discussed.

Ten years after the onset of the Arab revolutions, Facebook and Twitter have turned into powerful enablers of vast disinformation campaigns, harassment, censorship, and incitement of violence against activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. This, however, does not mean that the Egyptian online experience is over. A new generation of digital activists has started to emerge, bringing together disparate individuals and groups educating citizens how to exploit social media tools to support a common cause: democracy. Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution, social media activists remembered the 18–day Revolution, revisiting the besieged networked public sphere and examining the future of activism in Egypt. This study aims to map the Egyptian Twittersphere in its celebration of a decade of the Revolution, exploring the actors present, their voice and interactivity, and the main themes that evolved.

I dagens samhälle används Informations- och Kommunikationsteknik (IKT) på olika sätt och fritidshemmet ska följa med i utvecklingen av omvärlden. Fritidshemmet ska även utgå från elevernas behov och intressen. Syftet med denna studie är att skapa kunskap om hur pedagoger inom fritidshem använder IKT som verktyg för elevers meningsskapande, välbefinnande och utveckling i fritidshemmets verksamhet.

Följande forskningsfrågor fokuseras:

• Hur beskriver pedagogerna vad elever gör med de digitala verktygen?
• Vilka faktorer beskriver pedagogerna som viktiga om IKT ska användas på fritidshem?
• Hur beskriver pedagogerna sin kompetens i att arbeta med IKT på fritidshem?

Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt är det sociokulturella perspektivet som har sitt ursprung i Lev Vygotskijs teorier gällande utveckling, språk och lärande. En etnografisk ansats samt en kvalitativ metod har valts och empirin är således inhämtad med hjälp av observation samt semistrukturerade intervjuer.

Resultaten redovisas utefter våra tre forskningsfrågor. Resultaten grundar sig i empirin vilket samlades in genom observation och genom de semistrukturerade intervjuerna. Resultaten visar att pedagogernas intresse och tillgång till tid och digitala verktyg styr hur mycket de arbetar med IKT i verksamheten. Det framkommer även att surfplattan har fått en stor roll i dagens fritidshem eftersom den är smidig och lätt att bära med sig för att dokumentera och användandet har ökat markant de sista åren.

Increasingly many work processes depend on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services. These define the efficiency of how tasks are solved. The perceived usability of a service is heavily linked to the performance of the service, for instance the service responsiveness. Users do not like to wait; long response times (RTs) will interrupt their flow of thoughts and finally result in a loss of interest. Quality aspects, seen from the user’s point of view, have gained importance. While the rather traditional notion Quality of Service (QoS) is mostly related to technical quality parameters of the actual data transport, the more recently established notion of Quality of Experience (QoE) extends the notion of quality to include user perception and expectations. Obviously, QoE has strong subjective components and is also connected to the situation and context in which the user finds him- or herself. This work aims at finding quantitative relationships between QoE and QoS in order to provide application designers with means to adapt their application to available networks and the related conditions. We have particularly focused on a Geographical Information System (GIS) Map Service, with a web-based client-server application, used amongst others by professional users for tasks of urban planning. We have conducted user experiments to derive the relationship between user-perceived QoE, expressed qualitatively (through comments) and quantitatively (on the well-known scale from 1 = worst to 5 = best), and the response time, i.e. the time the user has to wait for the execution of a command. We have then established quantitative relationships between the response time and network problems such as losses and delays that have been generated in a controlled way using a traffic shaper between client and server.

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is regarded as one of the most prominent enablers for successful service provisioning across different access network technologies and devices. While new paradigms, e.g. seamless communication, enter the IMS, existing solutions, e.g. for authentication, need to be redefined, which is one of the major activities within the EUREKA!-funded Mobicome project, involving operators, manufacturers and academia. As there exist several candidate solutions for providing seamless authentication, there is a need for a set of criteria that helps to select the candidate that fulfils those criteria in a bestpossible way. Given this background, this position paper proposes a framework of criteria for the evaluation of authentication schemes in IMS. The primary criteria are security, user-friendliness and simplicity. Inbetween these criteria, the secondary criteria can be found. These are awareness, usability and algorithms. Each criterion, both primary and secondary, is then also divided into one or several substantiating sub-criteria. The discussion of the criteria is followed by a description of the evaluation methodology, which comprises both qualitative and quantitative evaluations such as SWOT analysis, use of NIST and ISO guidelines, user rankings, and measurements of authentication times. The paper is concluded with an outlook on future work, including studies and experiments.

Kenya, as with other developing countries, has joined the global bandwagon of using digital technologies to increase domestic revenues. Within the new strategies, lie great potential in achieving sustainable development, however, the shift is happening quite rapidly and has been made mandatory within a short period of time. The implications of this shift have prompted this research to analyse how it has shaped tax practices in Kenya. This study addresses the implementation strategies of an e-filings system, ITax in Kenya that was piloted, adopted and made mandatory in a short period of time. ITax as demonstrated in this dissertation has led to complexities including shifting tax expertise from tax consultants to information and communication technology (ICT) experts. I analyse what is at stake for all actors involved from those who commission its use to the taxpayers. I also ana-lyse whether Kenya was prepared economically or infrastructurally for this shift. The outset for this dissertation is models like ITax interface with the different interests of social/institutional worlds as it travels and gets translated generating complex and unintended effects. This study therefore combines postcolonial and technoscientific approaches in order to understand how the current implementation of ITax is connected to colonial development and fiscal rationale. Methodologically, this dissertation contributes to the socio-cultural perspectives to studying tax.

How could one understand and interpret the phenomenon of information technology, is the overall research question of this licentiate dissertation. The point of departure is the way some official texts in Sweden define the concept of information technology. It is possible to identify two dominating discourses; the technical and the social. In the first paper, empirical material from the Women Writing on the Net-project is mirrored against these dominating discourses. In the second paper, the focus is on how the dominating discourses are translated into librarians´ work practices and how librarians shape and transform information technology. How could one understand librarians´ ways of talking about information technology where the two separate discourses of information technology identified in the official texts do not seem to be identified as pure and separable phenomena? Feminist theories, feminist technoscientific studies and ´actor-network theory´ offer epistemological and analytical frames and screens necessary to understand information technology as a hybrid involving numerous heterogeneous elements. Introduction to the Papers Paper One, Discourses and Cracks - A Case Study of Information Technology and Writing Women in a Regional Context, is the first paper where empirical material from a local IT project is used and discussed and where it is mirrored against the dominating discourses of information technology. The first part of this paper discusses information technology as a political and practical discourse which is in part shaped by the repetition of an exalted rhetoric. This repetitive discursive model can be distinguished in global, regional and local contexts and reflects an optimistic belief in technology as an independent power that automatically furthers democratic development. Is it really this simple? The analysis includes a discussion of the concept of ´universal citizenship´ in a context of women's experiences in Sweden. The second part of the paper presents empirical material and experiences from the Women Writing on the Net-project (this is included in the framework of the DIALOGUE project, which was partly funded by ISPO/EU). The aim was to create a virtual space for women on the Internet and to explore the writing process in terms of aim, tool and method. The method of approach incorporated reflections and discussions about empowerment, democracy and representation of women. This created a more complex understanding of the values of the predominant IT discourses, and revealed the "cracks" in, and possibilities of feminist redefinitions of these values. In Paper Two, Translating and Negotiating Information Technology: Discourses and Practices, I continue exploration of my overall research question "What is information technology?" I study the dominating discourses of information technology; these I call "the technical suit" and the "social suit." In my empirical field studies among librarians in southeast Sweden I explore how the two faces of information technology - the technical and the social - are translated into librarians´ work practices. I study a project which was defined by the librarians themselves as an information technology project. I investigate how this project complies with the social/societal definitions of information technology, and how it complies with the technical definitions of information technology. In my second empirical study, I use two case studies with librarians involved in constructing web sites on the Internet. The Internet and the web are often seen in part as an open and undefined landscape in which new actors can move freely and build new partnerships, and partly as a shadow landscape of existing structures and relationships which can close up new openings. In the concluding discussion, I state that information technology seems to be both an amoeba and a chameleon. One minute it is a very pure and complicated technical story told by technicians. The next minute, it changes and turns into a financial story told by business people. It subsequently turns out to be an educational story told by teachers. It is also, however, a household story told by computer people. I suggest that information technology is impure. It is a hybrid. Inspired by Donna Haraways´s technoscientific metaphor of cyborg I claim that information technology is a cyborg in itself. In the third paper, From Networks to Fluids and Fires - A Prelude to Actor-Network Theory, I discuss a method of analysis I have tried to apply to my empirical material. I explore the notions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and Actor-Network Theory and After (ANTA). My point of departure is the way some official texts in Sweden define the concept of information technology by stressing the technical aspects of IT; at the same time they present information technology as a motor and a driving force for many sectors of society. In my research, I have discussed with librarians how they shape and transform information technology in their own work practices. The problems of analysing this empirical material started when the librarians started to talk about people, machines and money all in one breath. How could one understand their way of talking about information technology where the two separate lines of information technology identified in the official texts did not seem to be identified as pure and separable phenomena? How was it possible to understand the concept of information technology as it was used by the librarians, who seemed to involve all kinds of different heterogeneous elements which at first sight were very far away from information technology? It was when asking these questions that I discovered ANT and ANTA. In this paper, I present some basic ideas about these two research approaches by reading and analysing articles published between 1980 and the year 2000. In addition to the ANT and ANTA perspectives, I also introduce my own research questions: story telling and epistemological problematisations closely connected with feminist theories are, for example, closely intertwined in this paper.

In the autumn of 2004, two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Southern Sweden. One of these is a Master’s level program, while the other is a more basic, two-year vocational education. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based distance education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers/teachers now developing the courses for these educational programs, in co-operation with several other research groups in Scandinavia, see this co-construction of distance education as the beginning of an active Scandinavian network of competence around higher education and ongoing research and development in the e-government area. We are currently exploring the possibilities of using distance education in this area as a way of networking around on-going e-government research and competence enhancement in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as constantly ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the new educational programs. A reference group consisting of representatives from a number of municipalities and various government agencies plays an important role in this work.

In the autumn of 2004, two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Southern Sweden. One of these is a Master’s level program, while the other is a more basic, two-year vocational education. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based distance education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers/teachers now developing the courses for these educational programs, in co-operation with several other research groups in Scandinavia, see this co-construction of distance education as the beginning of an active Scandinavian network of competence around higher education and ongoing research and development in the e-government area. We are currently exploring the possibilities of using distance education in this area as a way of networking around on-going e-government research and competence enhancement in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as constantly ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the new educational programs. A reference group consisting of representatives from a number of municipalities and various government agencies plays an important role in this work.

Mean opinion scores obtained in subjective image quality experiments are widely accepted as measures of perceived visual quality. They have, however, a strong limitation regarding the reliability of the rated quality, since there is no explicit information as to whether the human observer experienced difficulties when judging image quality. We thus suggest that additional information about the observers confidence should be provided along with the actual quality measure. In this paper, we analyse two ways of obtaining this confidence measure; firstly as a confidence score given by the human observer and secondly as an indirect measure of the observers response time to provide the quality score. We reveal strong relationships of confidence scores and response times to the quality scores. We further propose a model to predict observer confidence based on the quality scores and response times.

In wireless communication, distortions are induced into an image through both lossy source coding and an error prone channel. The combination thereof causes complex distortion patterns in the visual content which vary strongly in their spatial distribution, some being uniformly spread and others being locally clustered. In the context of image quality, it is of interest to identify as to how the distribution of the distortions impact on the visual attention of human observers and thus on the perceived quality. For this reason, we conducted an experiment in which fifteen participants were asked to rate the quality of eighty distorted images and their corresponding reference images, while we recorded their gaze patterns using an eye tracker. The test images contained a wide range of artifact magnitudes, both locally and globally distributed, and were created using a wireless channel simulation model. We then correlate the visual gaze patterns of the human observers with local energy measures of the distortions in order to identify the effect of distortion distributions on the viewing behaviour of human observers when judging image quality. The outcomes serve to improve the prediction performance of objective image quality metrics that we previously proposed.

The modelling of perceptual image quality metrics has experienced increased effort in recent years. In order to allow for model design, validation, and comparison, a number of subjective image quality databases has been made available to the research community. Most metrics that were designed using these databases assess the quality uniformly over the whole image, not taking into account stronger attention to salient regions of an image. In order to facilitate incorporation of visual attention (VA) into objective metric design we have conducted an eye tracking experiment. The experiment and its outcomes will be explained in detail in this paper. The actual gaze data recorded in the experiment is publicly available in order to facilitate and encourage VA modelling for image quality metrics.

The aim of the project presented in this paper is that visually impaired and sighted players should be able to play the same game and share a gaming experience. The goal is that the game should be accessible to visually impaired players without any additional tools, such as text-to-speech, that may reduce the immersion. At the same time, sighted players should perceive the game as a regular game. This paper presents an evaluation of the game where the player immersion has been evaluated through a post test immersion questionnaire. The study was conducted with three independent groups: sighted players using graphics (n=10), blindfolded sighted players (n=10) and visually impaired players (n=9). Although progress in the game and the reported sense of control differed between groups, player immersion was very high in all groups. There were differences between the three groups only in one out of five immersion factors. The result shows that it has been possible to provide an immersive experience irrespective of whether the players are playing the game with graphics or using audio only. 

Difficulties with speech and language affect one in twelve school-aged children, with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) being a significant concern. SSD typically emerges in early childhood, impacting reading, writing, and language development. It includes difficulties with articulation, perception, and phonology, and its assessment process is extensive and time-consuming. To enhance efficiency and productivity within healthcare, this thesis aims to develop a digital platform to assess SSD in Swedish-speaking children. The platform leverages existing analog assessment materials from the Oral Motor Center at Danderyds Sjukhus in Stockholm, Sweden. 

The methodology was an iterative design process divided into four phases: initial ideation, creating mock-ups, integrating gamification elements, and final validation. Each phase incorporated direct input from SLPs, demonstrating the collaborative nature of the platform’s development. Two Co-design workshops were conducted with Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs), and the results were thematically analyzed. Key findings highlighted the importance of simplicity, adaptability, privacy, manual control, minimal distractions, and positive reinforcement. The platform’s features include streamlined test administration with adaptability for SLPs to modify tests according to each child’s abilities, as well as engaging but non-distracting gamification elements during assessment. In addition, it provides easy access to the test database with minimal pairs, along with the ability to create new pairs to change the test content dynamically. 

The successful development and validation of this digital tool underscore the importance of a user-centered approach in healthcare technology, ultimately contributing to better outcomes for children with speech and language difficulties. 

Background: The lockdown of a day centre for individuals with intellectual disabilities led to digital activities instead of traditional physical presence.

Method: This study is based on 17 interviews with staff of a day centre, directors of day centres and support persons.

Findings: The purpose of the digital activities was to overcome physical distance and to create “social connectedness” with service users at a day centre. Emphasis was placed on recognisability to meet the needs of the service users. When the lockdown was lifted, service users were included in the production of digital artefacts. There were also obstacles to digitalisation: some service users had no access to Internet or tablets at home, some lawyers forbid the use of common digital programmes and service users were denied being visible on social media, support persons lacked digital competence and were reluctant to digital activities.

Conclusions: The experiences of digital activities including coproduction of films made individuals with intellectual disabilities active and visible on social media. This might facilitate the possibilities for future digital inclusion in society. The support from staff at the sheltered accommodations was vital and when it succeeded it promoted a more holistic approach to the service users' everyday lives.

This article reports on part of a research project about children's searches for information on the Internet. The focus of the study is what children consider to be good web pages, combined with their ability to reflect upon the reliability of the Internet. The study is a case study of a group of fourth grade children searching for information, mainly at school. However, in interviews and conversation with the children, information-seeking both at school and at home was discussed. In this class, the teacher had a clear aim to start teaching from the children's questions and to discuss the reasonableness in the answers the students found.Children age 9 - 11 have the potential to reflect upon the reliability in web pages and they do actually do this. The teaching methods in this case study probably contribute to the development of a greater awareness about lies on the Web. It is important not only to have time to search, but also to discuss the results. If we want our children to be effective information handlers, there is no point in postponing the start of this development.

Introduction.The aim of this article is to determine the various skills necessary for seeking information on the Internet in educational settings. Throughout the article there is also an aim to present the students' perspective on possibilities and difficulties when using the Internet.Methods.The approach is ethnographic, which requires various data collection methods. In total 110 students in four different settings have participated.Analyses.The analyses were partly made with the help of the software NUD*IST for qualitative analyses, where sentences both from interviews and field notes were coded. Some analyses were of qualitative nature and based on selected material from the coded texts. Others were strictly quantitative and compared data from coded qualitative material with questionnaires and computer logs in a database sheet. In ethnographic analyses the material is read several times and compared in different ways to see what themes will emerge. In this case the respondents have also commented upon the result.Result.The students regard six different skills as fundamental: language, knowledge about the technology, knowledge about different ways of information seeking, how search engines work, setting goals and being critical

User centered design is a process which aims to understand user needs and desires by using different tools and methods. This is challenging in the industry as companies have different goals compared to the academic discipline of user centered design. As companies have different goals, common UCD methods which are used in the academic field are often not used. Therefore, there is a gap in how UCD is done in practice compared to theory. Designers and user experience specialists must use the tools which are available, capitalize on the opportunity to use existing resources in the organization in order to understand users and their needs.

Insights explain the why and the motivation of the consumer or user, and they are less apparent and intangible, hidden truths that result from continuous digging. Insights can be draw from several different sources, from data and qualitative sources. This thesis investigates from what available sources in an organization can insights be generated from in order to understand users and design better experiences, specifically from the organizations perspective. The purpose is not only to understand users but to drive the organization’s objectives and goals.

This thesis uses an innovative collaborative workshop methodology, working with digital designers, to answer the research questions and as a result presents an insights generation model. The research has been specifically conducted for an organization, and from their available sources, but the methodology and model creation has the potential to be used in similar settings, domains or projects.

A new vision in manufacturing is to develop product-service integrated value solutions. Today, few firms have fully realized this vision because they are not able to support the reasoning in the early stages of design. The purpose of this paper is to discuss engineers' cognitive challenge when replacing the core product rationale with value logic. The paper problematizes engineering design by dividing knowledge into the categories technically constructed (explicit) and socially constructed (tacit). In doing so, this study contributes the assumed effects of a perspective shift that could guide the development of computational tools.

Syftet med studien var att synliggöra hur små barn interagerar med ett mikroskop-ägg i utforskandet av naturvetenskapliga fenomen. I förskolans uppdrag ingår att arbeta med natur-vetenskap och teknik i barnens vardag. Förskollärarens kompetens och deras förhållningssätt gentemot barnen är betydelsefull för att möjliggöra för små barns digitala utforskande. Tidigare forskning visar att utforskande handlar om att få pröva, undersöka och på ett lekfullt sätt ta reda på mer om något. 

Det teoretiska ramverk som legat till grund för studien är social construction of technology, SCOT, vilket gett möjlighet att beskriva hur mening skapas i barns interaktion med olika tekniska artefakter. 

Studien genomfördes på en medelstor förskola i Luleå kommun med tre grupper barn i två-års ålder. Data samlades in med hjälp av filminspelning och ljudupptagning vid planerade aktiviteter. Bearbetningen har sketti en abduktiv analysprocess där en växelverkan mellan att härleda materialet till teoretiska utgångspunkter och en öppenhet för nya förklaringar och upp-täckter har varit vägledande. 

I resultatet framträder olika interaktionsramar som visar på vilket sätt barnen interagerar med den digitala teknologin utifrån tidigare erfarenheter och upplevelser. Resultatet visar även hur mikroskop-ägget på olika sätt kan möjliggöra för små barns naturvetenskapliga utforskande. 

Integrating sustainability in computing education entails broadening the scope of the education, but how can that be done while maintaining student engagement? Climate change and species extinction can appear far removed from data structures and algorithms to say the least. In our ongoing work of integrating sustainability in our Media Technology programme, we have addressed this gap by introducing systems thinking games and activities to broaden the scope, as well as by situating the issues addressed in the course in relation to their future profession. In this paper, we present our experiences of introducing and playing systems thinking games, how the systems thinking exercise sessions were conducted, outcomes of the sessions and finally some lessons learnt. Furthermore, we present and analyse changes we did to the exercises and that led to a richer material for discussions in the classroom.

In order to fulfill the Paris agreement, we need to drastically reduce carbon emissions globally. 2020 is a pivotal year in this endeavour as many projections indicate that emissions need to decrease significantly before 2030. This challenge pertains to all parts of society, including (computer science) researchers. This however clashes with the fact that flying to a large extent has become built-in to the everyday practices of research and of academic life. It is feasible to imagine that computer scientists could fly less than other academics since we ought to be innovators and early adopters of computer-mediated alternatives such as video-conferencing and other forms of digital meeting technologies. It is however also possible that we fly more because conferences might be a more dominant outlet for publications in our field in comparison to other research fields. At KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the researchers at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) fly the most. In this paper, we present initial qualitative results from a survey regarding travel that was answered by computer scientists at EECS. We are in particular analysing the free text answers in order to understand how computer scientists1 reason about their own flying and about the alternatives. It will be hard to fulfil the Paris agreement without decreasing flying significantly, but this requires us to rethink how we do research, and how we travel (or not) within academia. This paper contributes with knowledge about the perceived barriers and drivers for computer scientists to decrease their flying.

In most business areas today, competition is hard and it is a matter of company survival to interpret and follow up changes within the business market. The margin between success and failure is small. Possessing suitable, sustainable information systems is an advantage when attempting to stay in the front line of the business area. In order to be and remain competitive, these information systems must be up-to-date, and adapt to changes in the business environment. Keeping business systems up-to-date in a business environment such as this one, the telecom business, that changes rapidly and continuously, is a huge challenge. One way to approach this challenge is through flexibility in systems. The power of flexibility is that it keeps the system usable and relevant and allows it to evolve. This thesis is concerned with end-user tailorable software. Tailorable software makes it possible for end users to evolve an application better to fit altered business requirements and tasks. In the view of tailorable software taken in this thesis, the users should be seen as co-designers, as they take over the design of the software when it is in use. In this work, it is important that the users are aware of the possibilities and limitations of the software. However, tailoring is not enough, because the tailoring capabilities are always limited, meaning that tailoring cannot support completely unanticipated changes. The tailoring capabilities must therefore be extended, and tailoring activities must be coordinated with software evolution activities performed by professional developers. This allows the system to adapt continuously to a rapidly changing business environment and thereby live up to the intention of the system. Studies so far have tended to look at evolution from either a user perspective or a system perspective, resulting in a gap between development and use. This thesis takes an overall stand and states that it is possible to benefit from both the user and system perspectives, through collaboration between users, tailors and developers. It is necessary for users and developers to collaborate closely in order to make tailorable information systems both durable and adaptable to rapid changes in the business environment. In this way, the development of useful, sustainable software, which adapts easily to changes in an evolving environment, can be achieved. This thesis also presents a set of tools to support collaboration on equal terms between users and developers, in the technical design process of evolving the tailorable software and extending the tailoring capabilities. The toolkit aims at building a common understanding of tailoring, supporting democratic agreements and a common understanding of what kind of tailoring to implement. It makes it possible for the users to take part in technical design decisions and have a better understanding of trade-offs and system boundaries. These are key factors for the successful future evolution of a tailorable system, as it is the users who are the designers of the software during its future use. All of the research is based on field studies including participatory observations, interviews and workshops with users and developers. These studies led to the creation of prototypes and tools that act as mediating artefacts when exploring the research questions. The contribution of the thesis is twofold. Firstly, the thesis elucidates the need for a cooperative design process to ensure that end-user tailorable software remains useful and sustainable. Secondly, the thesis suggests a toolkit with four different tools to support such a cooperative design process.

This pilot study aims at illuminating human visual behavior in the interaction with pictorial instructions. The study is a multi disciplinary effort and is informed by the connection between gaze and attention as well as certain aspects of the Visual Literacy field and reveals a few basic visual behavior tendencies related to certain specific pictorial instruction types. By doing so, it is also an evaluation of the usefulness of a methodological framework consisting of six measures.The analysis of this paper is primarily based on eye-tracking data. In addition, an observed assembly that generated video and sound recordings is also part of the method. In the study 12 Film/TV- production students (out of which there is complete data from 9 informants) interacted with three types of types of visual instructions of the same assembled object, a solar powered toy.

As pointed out already by the French philosopher Dennis Diderot in the late 18th century, sight is a very efficient and elegant sense (Diderot, 1749). It is possible to see great distances and very close-up views. By looking, we can quickly get an idea of an environment or a specific milieu. Through pictures on the Internet, nonfiction books, storybooks for children or magazines, we get information about, for example, different parts of the world or fashion. Sight is used to orient us in many different ways, socially and geographically. It is possible to perceive space entirely from vision, but it could be apprehended from haptic experience as well as hearing. For sighted people, hearing and haptic understanding support the visual impression, while people with visual impairment have to depend on them. This chapter will address questions about how blind children learn to use touch for a better understanding of the environment. I will here focus on how tactile pictures in storybooks can support further discussions about everyday objects and episodes, and more abstract conversations. I will also address theories about tactile and multimodal reading processes that are involved in tactile decoding, and how they relate to visual perception and visual literacy. 

The aim of this design project is to explore ways of co-designing instructional videos, together with representatives from the elderly care sector, that show how to use Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) related to the Covid-19 pandemic and how to follow basic hygiene routines. We have used Design Thinking (DT) and Research through design (RtD) methodology. The results show that the main improvements derived from using a co-design process were input on the details needed to make the video more realistic and reflective of real-world scenarios.

Drawing on the theory of the Big Two content dimensions of social judgmentagency and communionthe author proposes that several findings about partisan differences in the United States can be integrated into one hypothesis: Republicans tend to put greater value on agency, while Democrats put greater value on communion. Moreover, on the basis of these values, Republicans and Democrats should judge their own groups as particularly superior on agency and communion, respectively. These hypotheses gained support in three studies on partisan values and ingroup bias, suggesting that the agency-communion framework may be useful for researchers studying how political groups differ in their worldviews, biases, and attitudes.

In the DitA project, we are studying and actively working with the development of integrated services and IT design within the public sector. This is a research and development project that is being run in cooperation between Blekinge Institute of Technology, five municipalities, two consultancy firms and a Call Center. During nearly three years (April 2000 - December 2002), the DitA project is being financed by Vinnova, the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems. The DitA project focuses on the continual design and development of supportive technologies for public services. We are especially interested in how these processes can be integrated in practice with the redesign and development of the contents and organisation of integrated public services on-line. There has been a rapid and widespread development of local Internet/intranet solutions for public services during the past few years. At the same time as the public sector is "going on-line", and interdependently with this, public service administration is having to come to terms with an on-going internal metamorphosis. New ways of managing and sharing information, and of constructing and organising public services within and between different service providers in the public sector, are being tested and explored. In the DitA project, we are studying how IT can be used to support local participation in the continual design and development of public services. The challenge is, as we see it, to explore how IT can contribute to creating an informated (that is, competent, well-informed and informative) rather than an automated public sector. During the initial phase of the project, we have mainly studied the daily use of computer support for service delivery at a number of different workplaces within municipal public service administration. We have also been studying at close hand the largely cooperative processes of design during the local development and tailoring of a document management part of a municipal intranet system. Now, during the second phase of the DitA project, we are focusing more on citizens' active participation in the design process than we have done previously.

Accountability is an important issue for design, in more than one sense. In software engineering literature, accountability is mainly seen as a goal for quality assurance of design processes. In ethnomethodological studies, accountability is a central concept for understanding how people organize their everyday actions and interactions. Where the different research approaches meet, in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) literature, new and hybrid understandings of accountability arise. In this paper, I explore and compare uses of the concept of accountability in a selection of texts. Finally, using a specific case as an example, I discuss what focusing on ethnomethodological understandings of accountability might imply for design of information technologies.

At present, I am involved in a three-year research and development project called Design of IT in Use; technologies for supporting services to the citizens (Design av IT i användning, or DitA for short). This project, which is being funded by the Swedish Council for Work Life, is about the use, design and continual support and development of computer support for public administration and information services offered by one-stop shops and call centers. The main focus is on the ongoing integration of such systems with public electronic information systems, and on new developments and design to meet the increasing complexity and diversity of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). One of the aims of our research is thus to participate in the developing of new forms for citizens' access to public information and public services via Internet. Our work in the DitA project is based on previous and ongoing longitudinal close-up studies of work practices and uses of technological support in actual physical locations such as one-stop shops and call centers. In our research work, we are actively involved in inter-organizational cooperation aiming to coordinate information and services on-line across and beyond old sectorial boundaries, both on the local, municipal level, and on a regional and national level. We are participating in the analysis and design of prototypes for on-line public information and public services, including the process of establishing focus groups and reference groups for the further development and testing of ideas, scenarios and prototypes. Through and beyond the challenges these developments are posing to traditional public service bureaucracies and their roles vis-à-vis the citizens?, we see more profound challenges to ways of understanding the use and design of modern technologies. We have found, in our research work, that we are having to search for new ways to grasp from where, whom, and what situation, these service centers are being contacted. The ?global access? offered by www is accompanied by a growing need to localize the user/citizen/person ? and for the user to be able to localize her- or himself - i. e. a need to design for and manage the specificities of the situation of use of IT. One concept we have been exploring recently, as a way of focusing this seeming paradox, is ?genius loci?, a concept used by architects and artists in reference to ?the spirit of the place?.

In this position paper for the MUM 2003 workshop in Norrköping, December 10th 2003, Designing for ubicomp in the wild: Methods for exploring the design of mobile and ubiquitous service, a brief description is given of methods used in connection with a series of ‘quick and dirty’ ethnographic studies of mobile ICT users. These studies were carried out as commissioned research during 2000. Because of predetermined constraints on the studies and resulting reports, alternative ways of describing and annotating interactions on the move were devised and tested. As a result, the initial single time line approach was abandoned and a number of messier, multi-branched chor(e)ographies of communication were developed. These were finally discarded at the time as failures. However, in connection with becoming more of a mobile ICT user myself, the issue of the social and situated construction of time, and the need for supporting several themes in parallel, along different time lines, has surfaced again, and now seems more relevant than ever.

The TANGO e-government arena is an on-going project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The aim of the project is to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. Our starting point is e-government understood as co-construction of technology, society and citizenship in everyday life. This approach is based on the Scandinavian Tradition of Participatory Design, but also motivated by ongoing technological development. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we are aiming to establish feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our current research questions focus on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design. Some of us involved in the research and development projects within the TANGO arena are women. Some of us are feminists (some more so than others). We are trying to cross boundaries, synchronize different rhythms, pull in the same direction, although from different positions. Does this make TANGO a feminist project? And if so, what (ouch!) can be learned from it?

New information technology is developing faster than the models, metaphors and methods in use for conceptualizing the sharing and managing of information in organizations, in communities and in society in general. The way we utilize information technology today does not seem to succeed in supporting the everyday work practices through which organizations accomplish their work. In this PhD dissertation, the results of a research project about skill, cooperation and computer support in public service one-stop shops are presented and discussed. Based on these results, alternative metaphors are presented for understanding the constructive aspects of front office work practices, One hypothesis is, that there is added value in not only being aware of multiperspectivity as an issue, but of making use of it in design. A problem here is that many traditional research methods, as well as most methods for systems development, are designed to diminish rather than make use of ambiguity and diversity. The metaphor of inverted indexicality of language is introduced in order to conceptualize the construction of meaning in action. New ways of conceptualizing IT management on the shop floor - including design issues - are proposed. Metaphors like the art of IT management, gardening and caring for are indicative of the issues at stake.

The chapter begins with a sketchy overview of what I see as the major shift during the past century in mainstream social theorizing, and a comparison of this to recent and on-going developments of IT and software practice. These themes are then brought together in a brief personal narrative of experiences from four research and development projects I have been involved in during the past four years. 'Genius loci', interpreted here as 'the spirit of the place', is a metaphor borrowed from architectural discourse and Greek mythology. It is used in this context as an analytical tool for re-conceptualizing the relationship of the user to the development, design and use of public information systems accessible via the Internet. The use of this metaphor, and of the concept of 'strong subjectivity', is a way of exploring if it is possible to objectify and instrumentalize the actions, rather than the actors, in the on-going discourse around human-machine interaction.

När tekniken förändras, måste också forskningsområden som fokuserar teknik och teknik i användning ompröva sina tankemodeller. Etnometodologin, läran om hur människor organiserar sin vardag, är en riktning inom sociologin som kommit att spela en allt viktigare roll i forskning om människa-dator-interaktion (HCI) och datorstött samarbete (CSCW). I den här presentationen ges några exempel på hur detaljerade studier av människors vardagliga handlande i arbetet kan leda till omprövning och ifrågasättande av hur funktionella våra nuvarande modeller och tankefigurer för organisationer och arbetets organiserande egentligen är. Vad händer till exempel om man fokuserar på aktiviteter och relationer istället för på hierarkiska beslutsstrukturer? Om man ser organisationer som ständigt pågående aktiviteter och underhåll av relationer? Hur skulle ett effektivt teknikstöd i arbetet kunna utformas, för den här förståelsen av vad en organisation är? Begreppet ?accountability?, som är centralt i etnometodologin, används här som ett led i argumenteringen för nya tankemodeller som underlag för utveckling av mobila tjänster.

In this panel, social scientists and computer scientists who have been involved in different ways in the work of challenging traditional understandings of abstraction in software design and development discuss the tensions between narratives and abstraction, metaphors and models, moods and modes – and more.

Slutrapport för utvecklingsprojektet Design av IT i användning - teknikstöd för medborgarservice (DitA), inlämnad till VINNOVA (finansiär) 2003-03-31. Kort sammanfattning och historik om projektet, publikationslista och lista över andra kunskapsspridande aktiviteter med koppling till projektet.

During the twenty-some years since ethnographic field studies in the workplace first began to be taken seriously as having possible relevance for the design of information technology, accountability has been one of the recurring concepts in the literature exploring these areas. Like usability and actability, accountability sounds like an important issue but proves a difficult feature to define. Of what exactly is it an attribute? Who defines it? For whom? Under what conditions? In this paper, I explore and compare a few of the various uses of the concept of accountability that I have come across in ethnomethodological and CSCW literature. In the third section, I tentatively indicate what focusing on accountability, in one or several different interpretations of the concept, might imply for design of IT in some specific cases. These brief and sketchy examples, aiming to be thought-provoking rather than analytically thought-through and articulated, are selected from recent development projects and on-going research work with which I have been involved or come in contact.

In the inter-disciplinary research and development project Design of IT in Use; supportive technologies for citizens? services (DitA), we are studying the use, design and continual support and development of computer support for public administration and information services offered by one-stop shops. Our main focus is on the ongoing integration of such systems with public electronic information systems, and on new developments and design to meet the increasing complexity and diversity of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). One of the aims of our research is to participate in developing new forms for citizens' access to public services via Internet. The DitA-project is funded by the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, VINNOVA, During our ethnographic field studies of work practices in public service one-stop shops, we have observed how closely interwoven people?s on-going choices of action and use of technology are with issues of accountability. This, in turn, has lead us to question whether the importance of considering and supporting accountability issues and needs is perhaps underestimated in the design and development of ICT. Even when designers deliberately focus on use- and action-oriented concepts such as usability and actability, it doesn?t necessarily follow that accountability surfaces as an explicit issue for design. When it does, it is often narrowed down to questions of human-computer interface design, and focused on system accountability versus the user (form and content of feedback information, etc). However, accountability issues, when explored in specific use contexts, are closely linked to social and organizational issues on a number of different levels. Accountability itself, when focused through the prism of people in action, becomes multifarious and ambiguous, begging further exploration of context and involved relationships. In the DitA project, we have deliberately attempted to focus on the concept of accountability in action and how it can be supported and mediated by the design of ICT infrastructures.

Can buzzwords be methodically exploited to develop more self-reflective and participatory research methods and practices within the ICT area? Research policies as well as research funding agencies rely heavily on buzzwords, yet tend to grow uncomfortable when these are deliberately highlighted and concatenated in research applications. This paper presents a multi-disciplinary R&D project in which we are exploring emerging methods and practices of participatory design of public e-services in India and Sweden. Using buzzwords as boundary objects, comparing methods and practices, with specific e-government projects we are involved in as examples, we attempt to address blind angles inherent in different cultural and disciplinary perspectives.

Problem-based learning is emphasized in teaching as well as in research at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, where we come from. Students work in projects, often in collaboration with businesses and other organizations in the region. Cross-disciplinary course modules and co-operative projects are offered, involving students and staff from different subject areas. As far as possible, student projects are linked to on-going research projects, and research, too, is carried out in close cooperation with the surrounding society, the public sector and enterprises/industries in the region. Consequently, when we decided to offer a net-based summer course in 2002, an important aspect was how we could continue to link our on-going interdisciplinary research cooperation to the course in a constructive way, such that the students could be involved in problem-based learning of relevance to both their own situations and our research work. In this paper, we describe and reflect on some of the experiences from our first net-based summer course, in which we used three main themes and a combination of individual and group tasks to support reflection and dialogue around the literature and the students? own contributions to the course. The course was net-based, but also included F-2-F; three consecutive days of ?live? lectures and seminars at the university campus in Ronneby.

The TANGO e-government arena is a project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The project is now nearing its end, and we are thus at the stage of reflectively reviewing what has actually been accomplished and how this relates to the original goals of the project. In July 2002, when the project began, the aim was to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we have aimed towards establishing feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our research questions have focused on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design. In this paper we look at how we organized our cooperation around these goals, and attempt to address those basic summing-up-the-project questions; How well have we succeeded? What have we learned in the process?