Sustainability has become a major concern of contemporary product design. Whether it's furniture, appliances, apparel, or technology designers of every field must now consider the ecological impact of the products that they create. Sustainability of material resources, impact and by products of manufacturing processes, energy using in production, product lifespan, and disposal are all things that must be carefully considered to maximize product sustainability. Strategies for reducing negative environmental impact include maximizing material usage, using recycled and or biodegradable materials, minimizing product weight and transportation, reducing energy consumption, and dematerialization. In more recent years the idea of increasing product lifespan has received a lot of attention from design theorists. This doesn't just mean making goods that can physically last a lifetime and have superior performance. The consumer must have an attachment to the object. This attachment comes from an emotional connection. Contemporary designers must find innovative ways of creating an emotional bond between product and consumer. How can mass produced goods achieve this goal? I believe the answer is involving the consumer in the design process in order to personalize and customize the products they buy. Made to order goods offer the customer the opportunity to co-design the products that they desire so that they suit particular needs and wants. Instead of selecting pre-manufactured goods from a store or website consumers can now personalize and customize an increasing number and range of products. Companies like Longchamp, Nike, Levis, Addidas, and Ralph Lauren are capitalizing on the fact that consumers want to personalize and customize the products they consume without having to lift a finger. By allowing customers to choose colors, sizes, styles, and even adding personalized logos these companies are capitalizing on the fact that consumers want customization. People become more invested and more attached to objects that they have spent effort in creating, allow for self-expression, and that are unique to the user. The consumer is allowed to be creative but this is only from a limited amount of choices available to them. My research involves taking the concept of customization further to make products that are completely unique to an individual. Nothing is more personal and individualized than the human fingerprint. I am exploring how the fingerprint can be abstracted and used as texture on the surface of furniture. By making objects that are personalized to the user it is my goal to deepen the connection between owner and object to increase product lifespan.

<p>Hemsidan handgjordasaker.se är en Internetmarknadsplats som tillhandahåller tjänsten för försäljning av handgjorda produkter. Detta projekt syftar till att ge förslag på hur anpassningar av hemsidans funktionalitet kan göras för att skapa en mer användarcentrerad hemsida. Genom att använda personifieringsprocesser har sidansgränssnitt presenterats på ett sätt som sätter användaren i fokus och med hjälp av utökade funktionaliteter erbjuder användaren möjlighet till att själv påverka och anpassa innehållet på hemsidan. Resultatet presenterades i form av ett ramverk för interaktiondär fokus låg på avdelningar med produkter och användarprofiler.</p> / <p>The webpage handgjordasaker.se is an online marketplace providing service for the saleof handmade products. This project aims to provide suggestions on how adaptations ofthe site's functionality can be done to create a more user-centered webpage. By usingpersonalization processes, sites interfaces is presented in a way that puts the user infocus and with the help of expanded functionality offers the user the opportunity toself-influence and adapt the content on the website. The results were presented in theform of a framework for the interaction where the focus was on products user profiles.</p>

The web is getting more and more characterized by personalization. Big socialnetworks like Facebook as well as the leading search engine Google increasingly usepersonalization algorithms to tailor the information that they present to users. All inorder to make the information more relevant and engaging for the end consumer. Howdoes this personalization affect journalists who increasingly search the web as a partof their journalistic research? In this essay we have looked at the effects thatpersonalization has on the journalists of tomorrow by conducting a survey amongstudents of journalism. We have also done a study of literature and theories to try anddetermine what consequences personalization will have on the internet in the future.We make an in depth study of the search engine Google as this is one of the mainsources of information for journalists and we have tried to tie this to theories of filter-bubbles and gatekeeping. We find that the question is in need of further studies toreally determine the threat that we face but conclude that information onpersonalization should be far more evident when it occurs.

Before making a purchase, more and more consumers in recent years are consulting other consumers¡¦ product reviews online, to assist them in making a purchasing decision. However, due to the massive amount of online reviews, consumers can hardly get useful information effectively. Hence, information overload has become a problem. Query functions in search engines like Yahoo and Google can help users find some of the reviews that they need for specific information. Nevertheless, the returned pages from these search engines are still beyond the visual capacity of humans. Therefore, this study aims to develop a new concept of personalized recommendation based on consumer product reviews to solve the afore-mentioned problem. A series of laboratory experiment examines the effectiveness of the proposed approach and compares this approach with other traditional approaches on precision of recommendation. Meanwhile, the meaning of the recommendation behind each approach is explained. Lastly, the prototype of recommendation system based on the proposed approach is illustrated. Our system can display the trend of the gathered consumer reviews in a graphical way, such as a product satisfaction run chart. The development of recommendation systems is not only beneficial to consumers, but also advantageous to sellers.

Along with the fashion of personal marketing, the traditional print media make a breakthrough by taking the advantage of digital technology to leap over the limitation of time and space. Take eDM as an example, the brand-new advertising technique that arranges bills, expenditure records and other personal information in group with the eDM, results in significant recommendation effect. Meanwhile it eradicates the prejudice that eDM is nothing more than spam and makes the eDM fresh and new! Therefore the recommendation effect appears. In the recent years, numbers of marketing researches pay much attention to the classical intimacy theory and put it into applications. Furthermore, the positive effect of personalization is verified by academical researches and business practices. Based on the manipulation of personalization and the theoretical application, this study is objective to confer the recommendation effect of personalized eDM and the mediating effect through intimacy. A two-stage survey by questionnaires was used with these samples of 490 ordinary consumers which are capable of using E-mail, and data were analyzed using the SPSS and AMOS for statistical tests. The results reveal that 1.the significant factor in influencing on intimacy is the personalization of eDM; 2.the significant factor in influencing on recommendation effect is the intimacy conceived by the eDM reader; 3.in the causal relationship between personalization and recommendation effect, intimacy is indeed an indispensable mediator. In the end, according to the findings, we draw upon some suggestions and limitations for future research.

Online shopping is becoming more popular in recent decades and there is certainly a variety ofvariables contributing to keeping customers interested in shopping online. Based on research inthe business-to-business setting we proposed four variables including security, communication,product and personalization that influence the relationship quality. The purpose of this study isto investigate whether these variables have impacts on business-to-consumer relationshipquality and explore their practical implications, and then suggest how companies enhance theircustomer relationship. The variables’ effects are empirically tested through regression analysiswith data obtained from questionnaire. The results show that four variables positively influencethe B2C relationship quality, but they have different effects in different companies.Additionally, we make practical recommendations by using Tmall and JD.com as case studies.

Ηλεκτρονικές κοινότητες μάθησης και υπηρεσίες εξατομίκευσης / E-learning communities and personalization

Η εκρηκτική αύξηση του μεγέθους των δεδομένων που είναι διαθέσιμα στο Δίκτυο καθώς και η ποικιλία των εργασιών οι οποίες μπορούν να πραγματοποιηθούν μέσω του Δικτύου έχουν αυξήσει σημαντικά την νομισματική αξία της κίνησης στο Δίκτυο. Για να κερδίσουν από αυτή την αναπτυσσόμενη αγορά, οι διαχειριστές ιστοσελίδων προσπαθούν να αυξήσουν την κίνηση χρηστών στην ιστοσελίδα τους, διαμορφώνοντάς τη κατάλληλα έτσι ώστε να ικανοποιεί τις ανάγκες συγκεκριμένων χρηστών. Η διαμόρφωση και η παραμετροποίηση των ιστοσελίδων παρουσιάζει δύο μεγάλες προκλήσεις: την αποτελεσματική αναγνώριση των ενδιαφερόντων κάθε χρήστη και την ενσωμάτωση των ενδιαφερόντων του στην παρουσίαση και στο περιεχόμενο της ιστοσελίδας. Σε αυτή την εργασία μελετάται ο τρόπος με τον οποίο μπορούμε να αναγνωρίσουμε με ακρίβεια τα ενδιαφέροντα ενός χρήστη χρησιμοποιώντας τα μοτίβα πλοήγησης και παρουσιάζεται ένας καινοτόμος μηχανισμός προτάσεων ο οποίος εφαρμόζει τεχνικές εξόρυξης στο Δίκτυο για να πραγματοποιήσει τη συσχέτιση μεταξύ των ενδιαφερόντων του χρήστη και του περιεχομένου και της δομής της ιστοσελίδας. Στόχος της τεχνικής που παρουσιάζεται είναι να παραμετροποιηθεί η σελίδα για κάθε συγκεκριμένο χρήστη με βάση τα ενδιαφέροντά του. Η πειραματική αξιολόγηση αποδεικνύει ότι είναι δυνατόν να συμπεράνουμε με ακρίβεια τα ενδιαφέροντα ενός χρήστη από την συμπεριφορά του κατά την πλοήγηση και ότι ο μηχανισμός προτάσεων, ο οποίος χρησιμοποιεί τα συμπεράσματα για τα ενδιαφέροντα του χρήστη, έχει σαν αποτέλεσμα σημαντικές βελτιώσεις στη λειτουργικότητα μιας ιστοσελίδας. / The explosive growth of online data and the diversity of goals that may be pursued over the web have significantly increased the monetary value of the web traffic. To tap into this accelerating market, web site operators try to increase their traffic by customizing their sites to the needs of specific users. Web site customization involves two great challenges: the effective identification of the user interests and the encapsulation of those interests into the sites’ presentation and content. In this paper, we study how we can effectively detect the user interests that are hidden behind navigational patterns and we introduce a novel recommendation mechanism that employs web mining techniques for correlating the identified interests to the sites’ semantic content, in order to customize them to specific users. Our experimental evaluation shows that the user interests can be accurately detected from their navigational behavior and that our recommendation mechanism, which uses the identified interests, yields significant improvements in the sites’ usability.

Personalized recommender systems aim to assist users in retrieving and accessing interesting items by automatically acquiring user preferences from the historical data and matching items with the preferences. In the last decade, recommendation services have gained great attention due to the problem of information overload. However, despite recent advances of personalization techniques, several critical issues in modern recommender systems have not been well studied. These issues include: (1) understanding the accessing patterns of users (i.e., how to effectively model users' accessing behaviors); (2) understanding the relations between users and other objects (i.e., how to comprehensively assess the complex correlations between users and entities in recommender systems); and (3) understanding the interest change of users (i.e., how to adaptively capture users' preference drift over time). To meet the needs of users in modern recommender systems, it is imperative to provide solutions to address the aforementioned issues and apply the solutions to real-world applications. The major goal of this dissertation is to provide integrated recommendation approaches to tackle the challenges of the current generation of recommender systems. In particular, three user-oriented aspects of recommendation techniques were studied, including understanding accessing patterns, understanding complex relations and understanding temporal dynamics. To this end, we made three research contributions. First, we presented various personalized user profiling algorithms to capture click behaviors of users from both coarse- and fine-grained granularities; second, we proposed graph-based recommendation models to describe the complex correlations in a recommender system; third, we studied temporal recommendation approaches in order to capture the preference changes of users, by considering both long-term and short-term user profiles. In addition, a versatile recommendation framework was proposed, in which the proposed recommendation techniques were seamlessly integrated. Different evaluation criteria were implemented in this framework for evaluating recommendation techniques in real-world recommendation applications. In summary, the frequent changes of user interests and item repository lead to a series of user-centric challenges that are not well addressed in the current generation of recommender systems. My work proposed reasonable solutions to these challenges and provided insights on how to address these challenges using a simple yet effective recommendation framework.

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