| 1. |
- Vuorio, Tuomas
(författare)
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Information on recreation and tourism in spatial planning in the Swedish mountains : methods and need for knowledge
- 2003
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Swedish mountain region makes up about one third of the country but includes less than 2 per cent of the population. It stretches for over 1000 km and includes 90 per cent of the total nature conservation area in Sweden. With its 8000 km of hiking trails and 100 mountain huts and lodges it is one of the most important areas for outdoor recreation and tourism - visited by one fourth of the Swedish adult population every year. With the current decline of the extractive industries tourism has become an important development issue in the area. Effective spatial planning in the mountains presupposes good information on tourism and outdoor recreation. Municipalities need adequate data to base planning on. One precondition for more effective information supply to spatial planning is research and development of methods. It must be possible to follow developments, predict environmental effects and effects on user attitudes, satisfaction etc. There are big differences between visitors in the mountains. Their needs and interest in different nature experiences, their tolerance towards crowding and contacts with other users vary a lot. It is important for planning and management to find out which qualities users are looking for and appreciating and to have a clear picture of the variance between different users. Management of recreation areas is normally combined with conservation and often has two goals: i) to maintain “natural conditions” and ii) to provide recreation opportunities. These two goals will often be contradictory. Resolving this conflict is both a theoretical and practical problem. The discourse within spatial planning differs from the nature conservation discourse. While the nature conservation discourse comes from a tradition of “calculating rationality” and a scientific, central view that points out the foremost values – “national interests”, national parks, world heritage areas – the basis of the spatial planning ideology in Sweden is a conception of local, political decision making. The Swedish planning system with a planning monopoly and veto of the municipalities is in theory a system with deliberative or communicative rationality: the plan is supposed to express citizens’ will and needs expressed through their representatives. How to provide the planning system with relevant information on different levels, i.e. information that can be used for predicting different reactions to different management actions in order to be able to handle conflicts will be one of the central questions in the thesis. Special attention will be paid to different methods of measuring nature tourism and outdoor recreation. Self registration combined with satisfactory studies on non participation can give a relatively good synoptic picture of the use of the area. At the same time it is obvious that the non participation varies too much geographically and between different points of time for self registration alone to be used for studying frequencies and patterns of use. Flight observations carried out as a part of the study in Södra Jämtlandsfjällen (article II) proved to be a good method of studying the patterns of camping. They were also important for conflict analysis and studying divergences. The indirect methods for estimating the total number of visitors have to be calibrated often, which can be difficult (for example number of visitors in a car or a buss). The indirect methods risk missing factors that make it possible to get indications of possible tendencies in the use of an area. In situations where conflicts exist, it is important that the picture of the present situation is well established and legitimate. This means that both methods and the actors participating in the study have to be experienced as legitimate by all parties taking part in the planning process. A general conclusion is that there are not any good shortcuts to useful knowledge about outdoor recreation and tourism for planning as a whole, for management or for EIA. Need for predictions is far too big to make indirect data useful alone. Three studies are presented: i) a national screener study on current tourism patterns in the Swedish mountain region, ii) a case study among the visitors in Södra Jämtlandsfjällen and iii) a case study among the residents in Södra Jämtlandsfjällen.
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| 2. |
- Björkman, Christina
(författare)
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Challenging Canon : The Gender Question in Computer Science
- 2002
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The gender question in computer science is often presented as: "Why are there so few women in computer science and what can be done about that?" This question usually focuses on women. Sometimes 'men' or 'gender' enter the discussions. However, it is not common that the second part of the sentence - computer science - is considered. The papers in this thesis challenge, in different ways, how the gender question is usually perceived and discussed within the community of computer scientists, and where solutions are looked for. The approach taken is to move focus from women/gender to the discipline of computer science itself. This means the question is raised towards a more general level, towards "the science question", discussing the discipline, its paradigms and knowledge processes. Theories and methodologies from gender research, used within computer science, offer new possibilities to develop broader and more complex understandings of "the gender question in computer science".
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| 3. |
- Elovaara, Pirjo
(författare)
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Heterogeneous hybrids : Information Technology in Texts and Practices
- 2001
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.
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| 4. |
- Berander, Patrik
(författare)
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Prioritization of Stakeholder Needs in Software Engineering : Understanding and Evaluation
- 2004
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In everyday life, humans confront situations where different decisions have to be made. Such decisions can be non-trivial even though they often are relatively simple, such as which bus to take or which flavor of a soft drink to buy. When facing decisions of more complex nature, and when more is at stake, they tend to get much harder. It is often possible to deal with such decisions by prioritizing different alternatives to find the most suitable one. In software engineering, decision-makers are often confronted with situations where complex decisions have to be made, and where the concept of prioritization can be utilized. Traditionally in software engineering, discussions about prioritization have focused on the software product. However, when defining or improving software processes, complex decisions also have to be made. In fact, software products and software processes have many characteristics in common which invite thoughts about using prioritization when developing and evolving software processes as well. The results presented in this thesis indicate that it is possible to share results and knowledge regarding prioritization between the two areas. In this thesis, the area of prioritization of software products is investigated in detail and a number of studies where prioritizations are performed in both process and product settings are presented. It is shown that it is possible to use prioritization techniques commonly used in product development also when prioritizing improvement issues in a software company. It is also shown that priorities between stakeholders of a software process sometimes differ, just as they do when developing software products. The thesis also presents an experiment where different prioritization techniques are evaluated with regard to ease of use, time consumption, and accuracy. Finally, an investigation of the suitability of students as subjects when evaluating prioritization techniques is presented.
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| 5. |
- Brandt, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Informatisk forskning om riskanalysprocess applicerad på Apoteket AB:s kundcenterverksamhet
- 2004
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- English summary This licentiate paper describes a study of how the introduction of Customer Care Centres into The Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies affects its work on risk analysis. The two Customer Care Centres in operation today function as central nodes to which calls are connected that before were usually answered by one of the country’s 900 pharmacies. In addition the Customer Care Centres can offer extra channels of communication such as fax, e-mail and the Internet via The Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies’ home page, to increase access for customers and other interested parties as well as to meet the demand for different ways of obtaining information in today’s information age. The integration with The Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies’ other systems offers a rapid answering service and allows customers to accomplish the greater part of their errands themselves. What is easily overlooked, however, is how information security is affected by the introduction of Customer Care Centres and the accompanying integration and especially the dangers and risks that threaten the organisation and indirectly even the customers. A valuable tool that is used in information security, to try to foresee as well as to narrow down as many of the threats as possible, is risk analysis. Today one has begun to see an increased awareness in the general public of the risks and threats related to, amongst other things, the Internet regarding its use by both individuals and commercial and other organisations. As a result firms and organisations have realized the importance of pursuing an active security policy in order to provide an appropriate level of security. It is very important that customers have the same confidence in the firm’s or organisation’s trademark as before, irrespective of organisational or technological changes that have taken place internally. An important part of the process to achieve this, is risk analysis and the results it produces. In this study we have drawn attention to the need of adapting the risk analysis, used in the organisation, to the new Customer Care Centres. This need is great, especially since the communication channels are of different kinds. This results in their respective threats being different. Therefore this broad spectrum of threats must be highlighted in risk analysis and the work with it. Developments in the surrounding environment should also be reflected in risk analysis which accordingly needs to be dynamic. In this study we have attached great importance to the placing of risk analysis in a holistic context.
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| 6. |
- Carlsson, Patrik
(författare)
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Multi-Timescale Modelling of Ethernet Traffic
- 2003
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ethernet is one of the most common link layer technologies, used in local area networks, wireless networks and wide area networks. There is however a lack of traffic models for Ethernet that is usable in performance analysis. In this thesis we describe an Ethernet traffic model. The model aims at matching multiple moments of the bit rate at several timescales. To match the model parameters to measured traffic, four methods have been developed and tested on real traffic traces. Once a model has been created, it can be used directly in a fluid flow performance analysis. Our results show that, as the number of sources present on an Ethernet link grows, the model becomes better and less complex.
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| 7. |
- Diestelkamp, Wolfgang
(författare)
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On Design Methodology for Flexible Systems
- 2002
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In software architecture, two seemingly contradicting goals are to be considered when designing systems, namely maintainability and performance aspects. It seems to be commonly accepted that systems can be designed either for flexibility and thus easily be maintained, or for performance, but generally not both at the same time. In this thesis we dexcribe blexibility and resulting maintainabiltiy from different aspects and show how it can eventually be achieved togehter with acceptable performance.
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| 8. |
- Ekdahl, Peter
(författare)
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Educative Moments. : Rethorics and Realities
- 2002
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The concepts learning processes, gestalting and digital technology are closely associated with most people’s personal experiences in life and thus constitute significant ideas about their hopes, dreams and life content. The concepts are context-dependent and ought therefore to be studied from several interdisciplinary perspectives. To this end and to limit the scope of my thesis, I have chosen to study them from two vantage points – from the perspective of the Blekinge region of Sweden and from a third-world perspective. The reason I have chosen these two angles is that studying these concepts on the local level provides the necessary closeness, while considering them in a third-world perspective provides the necessary distance. In order to illustrate the complexity of the concepts, I have chosen to study both the rhetorical level – the narratives, the dreams and the hopes – and people’s actual experiences, i.e. the realities, hence the dialectical title of the thesis. “The educative moment” is the rare moment when rhetorics and realities coincide. When traditions and changes together cause renewal on an individual or collective level, the conditions are created for human beings to be able to see themselves and their relations in a new light.
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| 9. |
- Ekelin, Annelie
(författare)
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Working with the Fogbow : Design and Reconfiguration of services and Participation in E-Government
- 2003
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about the metaphors of the rainbow and the fogbow, investigations and evaluations, public Internet monitors, writing women, reflections and discussions about politics, design and democracy. It is also about the ongoing re-structuring of participation in service design within the development of E-Government. The aim behind the drive towards E-Government is to modernise administration and make it more efficient. The transformation and modernisation of public services are proclaimed to bring about a change in services based on a 'citizen-centred approach.' In such a process, communication between citizens and public authorities should play an essential role. Themes such as accountability, accessibility and participation all form part of the reconfiguration and at the same time these themes is shaped by the transformation. The papers in this thesis discuss, in different ways, how this reconfiguration is enacted in practice. Theories and methodologies from feminist theories, participatory design and informatics, are used in order to develop broader and more complex understandings of ongoing development within E-Government. Introduction to the papers Paper I Everyday Dialogue and Design for Co-Operative Use: An Evaluation of the Public Internet Monitor Project Accessibility is a central issue in the achievement of democracy, i.e. with respect to the opportunity for and right to 'access' to new technology and information – an argument also used when justifying the Public Internet Monitor Project. 'Access' in this context refers not only to purely physical access to new technology and information, it is also about the opportunity to take part in community business on several different levels. The present sub-report presents the project and its background. The paper also discusses the way in which the Public Internet Monitor Project as a whole has contributed to the development of a social interface or contact surface between citizens and public authorities, as well as how it has stimulated processes of change within public administration and in contacts between public authorities and citizens. Among the questions raised during the evaluation are; how local networks and activities can be stimulated by the citizen monitor and how the user's ideas and experience can be utilised in local adaptations so that they become an essential part of a continuous development of services and technology. The paper also describes the linked chains of responsibility exemplified in the excerpts from the interviews. These also include final users as a means of creating a personalised service adapted to local praxis and user environments. The question is posed "is it possible to talk in terms of interactivity on several different levels, not only in the sense of transmitting information or communicating, but also as a means of creating a relation-based interactivity?" Paper II Reconfiguration of Citizenship: Rights and Duties in Development of Public Services This paper presents the case of the cleaner in the library and some examples of feedback failures. Access to information, technology, and to some degree, participation in development of new services, is a central issue in the prevailing eGovernment discourse. This vision also comprises the idea of the active, contributing citizen and considers the development of local public participation as a process of co-construction of citizenship and services engaging several actors on different levels. At the same time, access must be seen as a contemporaneous process of inclusion and exclusion, a defining and drawing up of the boundaries of a new electronically mediated membership, where access is becoming a prerequisite for activating citizenship, transforming "the right to have access" into a "duty to participate", not just for citizens but for the employees who must manage the reconfiguration of citizenship and relations. The foundations for participation, however, turn out to be relatively restricted in practice. The original title of the paper was: Co-Construction of Citizenship: Rights and duties in development of public services. Paper III Consulting the Citizens – Relationship-based Interaction in the Development of E-Government This paper investigates current practices for involving citizens in the development of web-based services in public administration and tries to track their motives. With respect to democratisation, I argue that there is a large potential in adopting participatory design methods for establishing relation-based interaction between administration and citizens. The paper presents an analysis of E-Government initiatives. More particularly it explores the discourse of the materials surrounding these initiatives, particularly with respect to value systems derived from the marketing perspective contra democratic values. It demonstrates that conventional images of democracy have only a background role to play in such efforts. Paper IV Mapping Out and Constructing Needs in the Development of Online Public Services This paper is based on a study concerning experiences of, access to and requests for public services on-line, within the RISI+ Project. The paper presents a pilot study of the setting up of public services in the local context of the county of Blekinge, in southeast Sweden. The study was conducted as a peer evaluation of a selection of methods, or types of needs analysis, used by different actors and producers of public services in order to gain a picture of various needs among users. One part of this study focuses on the views expressed by service providers about the dialogue between themselves and citizens on the provision of public services. This is compared with the practical use or, in some cases, lack of use, of explicit techniques, such as questionnaires, larger surveys and work carried out with the help of focus groups. A basic question is, 'what role does citizen involvement play in the analysis of needs and services and in the choice of design?'. Parts of this report were presented in a poster display at the NordiCHI 2000 conference, "Design versus design" in Stockholm in October 2000 and, in a different version, as a work-in-progress report at the PDC 2000 (Participatory Design) Conference "Bringing in more voices" , in New York in November. Paper V Making E-Government Happen : Everyday Co-Development of Services, Citizenship and Technology This paper describes the use of a metaphorical figure used in different contexts as part of a discussion of working relationships of the co-development of services, citizenship and technology change. The paper discusses the challenge of developing a supportive infrastructure for the ongoing local adaptation and development of public services as citizens use them. Developing supportive structures for co-operation in the design task involves incorporating ways of including the general public, mapping out networks, developing tailorable software and cultivating shop-floor management. If continuous joint co-development of services is made a central part of the co-development of services, citizenship and technology, this also blurs the boundaries between governmental and municipal authorities, private sector employees and other actors within, for example, the voluntary sector - but above all, continuous joint co-development blurs the boundary between citizens and local authorities. The citizens become key figures in the 'web of connections' that makes up the design, content and use of new technologies. In the discourse on participation in E-Government, few reflections are made concerning the basic issue of the democratic values that could be gained by early involvement of local employees and citizens in developmental work or technology-based changes. Making more deliberate use of participatory design methods for incorporating multi-perspectives in service design as well as technology production and use could be a way to stimulate a broader, more inclusive and sustainable participation in local development of E-Government. Paper VI Discourses and Cracks - A Case Study of Information Technology and Writing Women in a Regional Context This is the first of the papers I wrote, where empirical material from a local IT project is discussed and mirrored against the dominating discourses of information technology. Paper VI 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. The second part of the paper presents empirical material and experiences from the Women Writing on the Net-project (this was included in the framework of the DIALOGUE project, which was partially funded by ISPO/EC). The aim of the project was to create a virtual space for women on the Internet, and to explore the writing process in terms of aims, tool and method. The method of approach incorporates reflections and discussions about empowerment, democracy and representation of women. This contributed to 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.
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| 10. |
- Englund, Thomas
(författare)
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Dynamic characteristics of automobile exhaust system components
- 2003
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Demands on emission control, and low vibration and noise levels have made the design of automobile exhaust systems a much more complex task over the last few decades. This, combined with increasing competition in the automobile industry, has rendered physical prototype testing impractical as the main support for design decisions. The aim of this thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamic characteristics of automobile exhaust system components to form a basis for improved design and the development of computationally inexpensive theoretical component models. Modelling, simulation and experimental investigation of a typical exhaust system are performed to gain such an understanding and evaluate ideas of component modelling. Modern cars often have a gas-tight bellows-type flexible joint between the manifold and the catalytic converter. This joint is given special attention since it is the most complex component from a dynamics point of view and because it is important for reducing transmission of engine movements to the exhaust system. The joint is non-linear if the bellows consists of multiple plies or if it includes an inside liner. The first non-linearity is shown to be weak and may therefore be neglected. The non-linearity due to friction in the liner is, however, highly significant and gives the joint complex dynamic characteristics. This is important to know of and consider in exhaust system design and proves the necessity of including a model of the liner in the theoretical joint model when this type of liner is present in the real joint to be simulated. It is known from practice and introductory investigations that also the whole system sometimes shows complex dynamic behaviour. This can be understood from the non-linear characteristics of the flexible joint shown in this work. An approach to the modelling of the combined bellows and liner joint is suggested and experimentally verified. It is shown that the exhaust system is essentially linear downstream of this joint. Highly simplified finite element models of the components within this part are suggested. These models incorporate adjustable flexibility in their connection to the exhaust pipes and a procedure is developed for automatic updating of these parameters to obtain better correlation with experimental results. The agreement between the simulation results of the updated models 5 and the experimental results is very good, which verifies the usability of these component models. A major conclusion is that in coming studies of how engine vibrations affect the exhaust system it may be considered as a linear system if the flexible joint consists of a bellows. If the joint also includes a liner, the system may be considered as a linear sub-system that is excited via a non-linear joint.
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