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<p>The prevailing urban planning strategy in the 21st century in many European cities is urbanisa-tion by densification. The strategy, which has obvious consequences for green and open space, has commonly been described as “Compact city” or “Smart growth”. Densification has mainly been initiated by large building companies, often in conflict with local lobby groups with strong social capital. This has frequently led to deadlocks in planning, especially concerning green space exploitation. This paper suggests new tools for understanding and measuring how urban structuring affects open space accessibility, not only because urban structure distributes open space to people, it also creates users and stakeholders.</p><p>Since the 1950:s Swedish urban planning has been led by normative open space guidelines developed by research and national ministries, guidelines that are still present but has lost in power. Generally these guidelines are based on either density, i.e. sqm green space/person within a defined area, or range, i.e. maximum metric distance to a minimum park size. Planning practice has essentially dealt with size and qualities, often confusing, in micro economic terms, use value and non-use value (e.g. the “ecological”). This paper introduces new ways of integrating use value (sociotop) and orientation (axial lines) into new measures of open space accessibility. A new GIS-application “The Place Syntax Tool” (PST), developed within the research project, makes it possible to calculate the ‘topological’ open space accessibility from every place (address or plot) in an urban area, current or planned. ‘Topological’ accessibility analyses handles the “modified area unit problem” (MAUP) discussed in geography.</p><p>A questionnaire from 2001 (TEMO) states that, citizens in some dense inner-city-districts experience higher park and nature accessibility than in some low-density “green” sub-urbs in Stockholm. This peculiar result was the starting point of testing old and new measures in ten different city districts, using PST. The conclusion is that a new measure, which take range, orientation, green space size and number of use values into account, correlates consid-erably better to the questionnaire (R2=0,75 p<0,001), than any conventional measures. It shows that the 19th century “deformed” inner city grid with defined urban parks connected by green boulevards more effectively distributes open space to many citizens compared with the “interrupted” grid and segregated green structure of the post war “modernist” suburbs.</p><p>Another finding is that axial lines seem to capture movement to and within open space better than any metric measure. Correlation was found when comparing observed pedes-trian flow and calculated population accessibility (Södermalm dij=3, R2=0,682, p<0,001; Hög-dalen dij=6, R2=0,442, p<0,001). Correlation was also found when comparing a questionnaire asking “How often do you go to your favourite green area?” (USK 2002) and axial line distance between all addresses in the study areas and the closest green area (R2=0,77, p=0,018). These results can also be explained by the Space syntax integration analysis which shows that the green spaces in the inner city grid is much more integrated than in the post war suburbs. This means that orientation plays a big part in determining if, and how often people visit open spaces.</p><p>Consequently, better measures could promote understanding of open space planning as an asset to city development, help overcome the deadlock in densification planning and change the common opinion of open space and “green” from a static to a dynamic urban entity.</p>

Video mediated communication (VMC) is a two way real time audio and video communication between remote places. VMC has the potential to be applied favourably to many activities, services and functions in smart homes. The concept of smart homes refers to homes equipped with technological systems and appliances enabling centralised or remotely controllable integrated functionalities and services. The main question for the current research work is formulated accordingly: How can spaces for video mediated communication be designed and integrated into smart homes? The governing idea is that there are two main perceptions of space in the design and integration of video mediated communication into smart homes. One concerns the conception of private and public spaces, the other relates to the idea of physical and digital spaces. The interrelationship between these two concepts is supposed to become important when VMC is considered for smart home applications. This thesis is written from an architectural perspective. It refers to the functionalistic paradigm here defined basically as the set of essential functions of the home that have to be solved in order to achieve good dwellings. The function of the home can be described as the organisation of space and furniture to support activities and processes in and around it. The thesis is based upon five papers and a covering text providing background, analysis and reflection, as well as ideas on further development. The research method can be described as mainly explorative and design-oriented. A principal result from the study is that a novel modality of space, the public digital space, appears when VMC is introduced into smart homes. Further, it is advocated that this modality is a relevant issue for the architectural profession and architectural research.

The thesis presents a research project in graphic design including the development of a symbol system that represents tastes of wine as consumer information. The thesis has three main chapters; design, theory and empirical foundation. The design chapter clarifies the design concept and its evolution from a traditional standpoint to its present state in the international area of design research as design theory. The theoretical chapter presents a map of concepts in order to explain problems and practical solutions in the design process. The concepts are based on the philosophical ideas of Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and concern interpretation of sense information, symbols and signs, picture and image. The design of the symbol system concerns the experience of taste, as a translation from words to pictures. The empirical chapter comprehends both a description of the design process and of the empirical research. The method used is prototyping with a reference group of branch experts. The empirical research has evaluated the possibility to interpret, learn, use and understand the symbol system. The method used is a survey with questionnaires to a group of wine consumers

<p>Video mediated communication (VMC) is a two way real time audio and video communication between remote places. VMC has the potential to be applied favourably to many activities, services and functions in smart homes. The concept of smart homes refers to homes equipped with technological systems and appliances enabling centralised or remotely controllable integrated functionalities and services. </p><p>The main question for the current research work is formulated accordingly: How can spaces for video mediated communication be designed and integrated into smart homes? The governing idea is that there are two main perceptions of space in the design and integration of video mediated communication into smart homes. One concerns the conception of private and public spaces, the other relates to the idea of physical and digital spaces. The interrelationship between these two concepts is supposed to become important when VMC is considered for smart home applications.</p><p>This thesis is written from an architectural perspective. It refers to the functionalistic paradigm here defined basically as the set of essential functions of the home that have to be solved in order to achieve good dwellings. The function of the home can be described as the organisation of space and furniture to support activities and processes in and around it. The thesis is based upon five papers and a covering text providing background, analysis and reflection, as well as ideas on further development. The research method can be described as mainly explorative and design-oriented. </p><p>A principal result from the study is that a novel modality of space, the public digital space, appears when VMC is introduced into smart homes. Further, it is advocated that this modality is a relevant issue for the architectural profession and architectural research. </p>

<p>The thesis presents a research project in graphic design including the development of a symbol system that represents tastes of wine as consumer information. The thesis has three main chapters; design, theory and empirical foundation.</p><p>The design chapter clarifies the design concept and its evolution from a traditional standpoint to its present state in the international area of design research as design theory.</p><p>The theoretical chapter presents a map of concepts in order to explain problems and practical solutions in the design process. The concepts are based on the philosophical ideas of Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and concern interpretation of sense information, symbols and signs, picture and image. The design of the symbol system concerns the experience of taste, as a translation from words to pictures.</p><p>The empirical chapter comprehends both a description of the design process and of the empirical research. The method used is prototyping with a reference group of branch experts. The empirical research has evaluated the possibility to interpret, learn, use and understand the symbol system. The method used is a survey with questionnaires to a group of wine consumers</p>

The role of social networking has widely been embraced in an entrepreneurial context due to its nature of providing easy access to information, support and other complementary resources needed for the creation and development of entrepreneurial venture (Omta et al., 2001; Johannisson,1990 cited in Song et al., 2017). The entrepreneurs’ network is affiliated with the study of social relations that can influence the creation and development of new business by shedding light on the functionality of social ties in the diffusion of resources that are vital for the establishment of firms (Greve, 1995). Therefore, studying the field of entrepreneurship in the context of social network can offer a fruitful perspective on entrepreneurship (Greve, 1995).Despite the vast and diverse research in the field of networking and entrepreneurship, there are still some gaps concerning what is actually going on in a network and the understanding about network operation, their nature and role in influencing business performance still limited to fairly broader and theoretical perspective (Jack, 2005). So, in line with these views, the purpose of this study is to explore and enhance the understanding of the networking in an entrepreneurial context by shedding light on the role of strong and weak social ties. The foundation of this study relies on Granovetter’s (1973, 1985) strong and weak tie hypothesis and Jack (2005) work, that by highlighting the characteristics, formation, and outcome of strong and weak social relationships contribute to building the concept of entrepreneur’s social network.A multiple case study of five entrepreneurs, operating their networks and businesses in Linköping, Sweden, has been conducted to achieve the purpose of this study. This research work uses a qualitative approach and is based on the semi-structured interviews, which allows a deeper insight into the studied area through analysis of multiple cases.The result of this study indicates that both the strong and weak social ties, in which an entrepreneur is bonded, are used to a varying level in terms of information flow. Strong relationships, that relies on frequent interaction, hold great importance in providing quality information as compared to weak relationships but simultaneously accountable for providing information that is useless and not up-to date. On, the other hand weak-ties contacts are dispersed in a social network and rarely interact with each other. But these weak connections are also important and play their role once get activated by entrepreneurs. Considering the information flow weaker relationships also occurred to be useful however the relatively small size of the town can mean that similar information is repeated by several connections. Since, the aspect of individual knowledge and experience help in the formation of new relationships but the result of this study highlights that, a personal motivation and drive towards networking also plays a crucial role in the formation of both strong and weak ties.The study findings can benefit the researchers and the entrepreneurs in developing their knowledge about networking and role of social ties in providing access to information and resources necessary for the creation and the development of venture. However, the strong connections hold a dominant position concerning the information and the resource flow but weak connections are also crucial and provide support in areas that strong connections lack. Thus, the entrepreneur that keeps the balance between both his/her strong and weak connections can efficiently reap the benefit of social networking.

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