/ a b s t r a c t This thesis deals with the environment of the landscape in connection to movements of the body and of the mind which result in an art gesture. It closely focuses on an individual experience of a landscape as a unique environment. It explains concepts and speculates about their meanings. Through interviews, the thesis presents different approaches to art from plethora of artists, who work in and with the landscape. It deals with a didactic project which aspires to inspire students to think more deeply about the environment that surrounds them and to communicate their understanding o fit through art. Personal artworks created in Finland in the Arctic Circle region capture motion in the landscape of the nature and that of the mind.

Vi människor lever idag i ett samhälle där kraven från vår omgivning ökat markant, särskilt vad gäller komplexa produkter. Allt eftersom digitaliseringen och i sin tur digitala produkter utvecklas, ökar även kraven som ställs på̊ användaren i interaktionen. Detta medför en ökad mental ansträngning, också kallad kognitiv belastning, för användaren. Hemmet, vilket bör anses vara en kognitiv frizon, har nu blivit en plats för konstant interaktion och uppkoppling till sin omgivning. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka huruvida det går att designa produkter där den kognitiva belastningen vid användning är minimal. Detta med mål att utforma en produktserie vardagsprodukter där den kognitiva belastningen har reducerats. Studien ämnar att besvara nedan frågeställningar:Hur kan man genom produktdesign minska den kognitiva belastningen i hemmet?Vilken är den önskvärda interaktionen med kognitivt belastande fysiska vardagsprodukter?Studien grundar sig i viktig teori som avser kognitiv belastning, intuitiv design och användning, användarcentrerad design, affordance-teori såväl som fysisk interaktion. För att identifiera särskilt kognitivt belastande produkter bygger studien både på kvantitativ såväl som kvalitativ metod.Studien inleddes med en förstudie i form av en enkät för att få en överblick av problematiseringen. Detta följt av den kvalitativa undersökningen som utgör huvuddelen av studien. Detta i form av gruppintervjuer, workshop, probes och användartester. Det teoretiska ramverket tillsammans med genomförd metod resulterade sedan i en funktionsanalys och kravspecifikation. Tre produkter valdes ut som högt kognitivt belastande i hemmet. Dessa var; högtalare, dörrhandtag- och lås, samt fjärrkontroll. Studien resulterade i en produktserie av dessa produkter benämnd ”Mono”, som fick symbolisera utformningen av ett nytt fysiskt användargränssnitt. Studien visar på att det genom användarcentrerad design går att skapa kognitivt reducerande produkter, särskilt vad gäller att ta sig an ett samtida problemområde som kognitiv belastning, vilket produktserien ”Mono” lyckas med.Nyckelord: Kognitiv belastning, CLT, Kognitiv reducering, Intuitiv Design, Intuitiv användning, Användarcentrerad design, Affordance, Fysisk interaktion / Humans today live in a society where the demands from our surroundings have increased significantly, especially concerning complex products. As the digitalization increases and digital products develop, the demands on the user also enhance. The home environment, which is supposed to be every person's cognitive free zone has now become a place for continual interaction and constant availability to its surroundings. This causes an increased mental effort, also called cognitive load, for the user. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether it is possible to design products where the cognitive load is minimum when used. The study intents to design a product series of everyday products where the cognitive load has been reduced. The study aims to answer this following questions:How can the cognitive load in the home environment be reduced through product design?What is the desirable interaction with physical products that have a high cognitive load?The study is based on theories concerning cognitive load, intuitive design, and use, user-centered design, affordance theory as well as tangible interaction. To identify products with a high cognitive load, the study was based on both quantitative as well as qualitative methods.The study began with a quantitative survey whose purpose was to create an overview of the problem. The survey was followed by the qualitative method, which forms the main part of the study. The qualitative method included group interviews, workshops, probes, and user tests. The theoretical framework together with the completed method then resulted in a function analysis and a design specification. Three products were selected due to their high cognitive load. These three products were; a speaker, a door handle and lock, and remote control. The entire study resulted in a product series of these products named “Mono”. Mono symbolizes the design of a new physical user interface. The study shows that it is possible to create cognitively reduced products through user-centered design. Especially when it comes to addressing a contemporary problem such as cognitive load, which the product series “Mono” succeeds with.Keywords: Cognitive Load, CLT, Cognitive Reduction, Intuitive Design, Intuitive Use, User-Centered 3 Design, Affordance, Physical Interaction

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Educators in many disciplines are too often forced to rely on intuition about how students learn and the effectiveness of teaching to guide changes and improvements to their curricula. In computer science, systems that perform automated collection and assessment of programming assignments are seeing increased adoption, and these systems generate a great deal of meaningful intermediate data and statistics during the grading process. Continuous collection of these data and long-term retention of collected data present educators with a new resource to assess both learning (how well students understand a topic or how they behave on assignments) and teaching (how effective a response, intervention, or assessment instrument was in evaluating knowledge or changing behavior), by basing their decisions on evidence rather than intuition. It is only possible to achieve these goals, however, if such data are easily accessible. I present an infrastructure that has been added to one such automated grading system, Web-CAT, in order to facilitate routine data collection and access while requiring very little added effort by instructors. Using this infrastructure, I present three case studies that serve as representative examples of educational questions that can be explored thoroughly using pre-existing data from required student work. The first case study examines student time management habits and finds that students perform better when they start earlier but that offering extra credit for finishing earlier did not encourage them to do so. The second case study evaluates a tool used to improve student understanding of manual memory management and finds that students made fewer errors when using the tool. The third case study evaluates the reference tests used to grade student code on a selected assignment and confirms that the tests are a suitable instrument for assessing student ability. In each case study, I use a data-driven, evidence-based approach spanning multiple semesters and students, allowing me to answer each question in greater detail than was possible using previous methods and giving me significantly increased confidence in my conclusions. / Ph. D.

Tableau d'honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2011-2012 / L'objectif de ce mémoire est de montrer comment, dans La métamorphose des plantes et autres écrits botaniques de Goethe, la connaissance du règne végétal mûrit en intuition intellectuelle. En abordant par cet angle la botanique de Goethe, nous avons voulu la situer dans le cadre de la philosophie qui lui était contemporaine, celle de Kant et de l'idéalisme allemand. La spécificité de la conception goethéenne d'une participation spirituelle de l'homme aux formations de la nature consiste en ceci que, refusant la voie spéculative, elle prend racine dans un empirisme délicat baptisé morphologie. Cette science veut élever la raison humaine à l'intellect archétypique par l'exercice d'une imagination sensible exacte, seule capable d'épouser la légalité mobile des phénomènes organiques. Dans cet esprit, Goethe prétend que l'art est le meilleur interprète de la nature. Réciproquement, la morphologie constitue pour lui la propédeutique idéale à la pratique comme à la théorisation de l'art.

This work considers what ontology might be after the deconstruction of arché in Reiner Schürmann's and Giorgio Agamben's thinking. It addresses the question by reading Schürmanns historical deduction of the categories of presencing in his book Heidegger On being Acting: From Principles to Anarchy. This deduction is at the heart of his thought in that it tries to manifest what it means to live the transition from arché to an-arché, from a life under principles and why's, to a life without why, and the principle of anarchy. This transitional thought rests on what he calls the hypothesis of closure of the metaphysical field. The deduction is therefore a question of a relation between the first beginnings end as an other beginning. He shows this by establishing categories that are both conceptual- and sensible form. This reaches its full articulation in what he calls the categories of transition; categories in which the distinction between category and intuition seems to collapse – that are its own gaze or eye, that sees both the past and the future at the same time. This is a question regarding relationality: the transition from a causal relationality to an anarchic relationality, from a substance ontology to relational ontology. What is the relational status of the transition itself and its categories? This question lead to the main one: is the transition between arché and an-arché a relation between the two? The overall purpose is to explore this question in order to open, in the end, a path between him and Agamben. The later has pointed out that the key problem to live truly anarchic is a critique of the ontological relation because language presuppositional structure manifests in it, which takes its “full” form in his work The Use of Bodies. Here, perhaps – which we only can point to – Schürmann's thought can meet Agamben's in the caesura between arché and an-arché. Can anarchy ever be in a position of principle? In the end we will have to point to the notion of oikonomia as an area of further research to understand the question of anarchy between Agamben and Schürmann.