The paper will highlight the use of heating regimes throughout the twentieth century both in large cathedrals and rural churches of medieval origin in Sweden. How have norms of thermal comfort been balanced against conservation needs of the buildings, their interiors and valuable objects? The choice of heating regime in an old church can be seen as a negotiation between different stakeholders. Together these voices have been articulating a discourse on indoor climate since the late nineteenth century when churches in Sweden were first heated. The historical indoor climate in churches is poorly known but often referred to in discussions on what kind of heating and climate is suitable for interiors and their artifacts. This is why it is important to collect empirically based knowledge on the features of the past climate. The historical indoor climate is shaped by several factors. Here we look at heating regimes, meaning how heating and ventilation systems have been selected, designed and used. By studying decision making regarding the choice of regimes and also what experience was drawn from the application of technology we will better understand the priorities made between comfort and conservation aims and how scientific knowledge has been used (or not used) to reach these aims. / Kulturarvet och komforten: frågan om lämpligt inomhusklimat i kulturhistoriska byggnader under 1900-talet

The present study analyzes attitudes made manifest when media technology is used in teaching at Swedish upper secondary schools. It examines discourses related to the subject of history by comparing contemporary circumstances with those of the mid-1980s, making research in both educational history and history education indispensible to its execution. The study considers the impact of technology on human interaction as an essentially social construction. Furthermore, it addresses questions about the role media technology plays in current discourses, about the actors that are manifested in these discourses and about their didactic implications. Since the investigation focuses on discourse, it is an interpretive work. Analytical tools have been borrowed from the field of discourse theory to facilitate a broad understanding of discourse and communication. The analysis is conducted in order to reconstruct chains of analogy and nodal points of communication in media technology and teaching, with specific attention paid to matters related to the subject of history. Secondary school policy documents, curricula relevant to each period, teacher´s periodicals and interviews with history teachers are combined to reconstruct discourses on technology in education. Interviews were conducted with six history teachers, three of whom taught in the 1980s, while the remainder began teaching in the past fifteen years. The periodicals studied are Lärarnas tiding and Skolvärlden, including every issue published in the years 1983, 1985, 1987, 2008, 2010 and 2012. Four discourses on media technology in education have been reconstructed from this material. Two of the discourses are relevant to the mid-eighties, and have been called the discourse on the school of the future and the discourse on film, junk culture and education, respectively. The discourses reconstructed from the years around 2010 are named the discourse on the contemporary school and the discourse on good teaching. These discourses generally nurture an optimistic belief in what media technology can mean to school and teaching. The reasons for using technology in the classroom are based on notions of what is required from society or what is relevant to the students. The roles of media technology in education are affected by several groups of actors, including government officials, marketers, school leadership and teachers. The process was however never significantly affected by formal policy. One aspect central to a positive view of media technology in education was that it would improve the quality of teaching, especially in the case of history, characterized by storytelling and lecturing. Certain didactic considerations became visible in the study of these discourses, which risked being shallow and trend sensitive, insofar as it might be difficult for teachers to find suitable forums for peer-to-peer subject specific reflections on media technology.

This research looks at questions of power and expression as they are composed in various ways within networked and computationally-informed situations of the present. Drawing from the term as it is originally invoked in practices of computing, the research puts forward execution as a central conceptual framework for its investigations. In a computer program, a program becomes executable when it is able to execute a set of procedures within a designated set of relations and affordances. Similarly, the concept of execution developed here looks at the ongoing negotiations of various formative relations and affordances (technical, cultural, material, political) in practices of execution, describing certain notable techniques applied towards the task of making things executable. The examples looked at include several dominant media and technology practices of the present, as well as several alternative practices that point to other possible modes of execution. In doing so, the research highlights certain politically-orientated issues involved in questions of execution, working to further develop specific approaches aimed at describing, questioning and intervening into practices of execution as they occur in the world.

The Swedish industrial research institutes are research organisations that exist somewhat in between academy and industry, fulfilling an intermediary role as well as providing a space for research relevant to industrial companies, and they have a history of being funded by both state and industry as a way to support technical research in Sweden. The present study examines the history one of these institutes – the Institute for Surface Chemistry – with respect to three dimensions of its knowledge production: the role that basic and applied research has played for the institute, its external connections and the heterogeneity of its knowledge production, and how it has evaluated the quality of its research. The time period considered is 1975-2005, a challenging time for the Swedish institute sector, and the analysis is based on an interpretation of annual reports, research programs and newsletters from the period, as well as on interviews with institute managers and researchers.This work contributes to a wider research field in two respects. First, it provides input to the ongoing debate about how a changing research system is linked to changes in knowledge production. Second, it increases our knowledge of the Swedish industrial research institute sector, something interesting in its own right but that also can provide input to the ongoing policy reorientation vis-à-vis these institutes. The main novelty of the work is that it engagessystematically and historically with changes in knowledge production within an industrial research institute, something not done in previous studies of the sector. To briefly summarise the results, applied research gradually becomes more important than basic research at the institute, but basic research still keeps playing a rather large role for some time, even as this roleis downplayed in the official publications. At the same time, the institute becomes more heterogeneous in its knowledge production, associates closer with its industrial partners, and loses some of its independent knowledge production in favour of a more classic intermediary role. During the study period, the institute mainly ascertains the quality of its work through the use of traditional academic standards, and it retains a strong publication culture throughout.Three main conclusions are drawn: that the institute generally has oriented itself more towards its industrial partners; that this is the result of adapting to a situation in which the traditional state funding and political support appear ever more insecure; and that in spite of this general dynamic of adaption, the institute, thanks to a unique knowledge base or strong and well-connected actors, has sometimes been able to defend its preferred modes of knowledge production instead of adapting,something which also has had a notable impact on its development.

Texten jämför det analoga- och digitalafotografiet. Disskutioner kring arbetssättet, uttrycket i fotografiet, uppfattningen av det, de olika tekniska asspekterna och känslan i fotografiet är områden som berörs i texten. Även kamerans och fotografiets historia i allmänhet tas upp.

The medical imaging technology called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) stems from a blind measurement technology which was further developed in research and practice to enable seeing into the inner body. Vision with MRI was open-ended, and it was developed and tamed in a context of fragmented medical perspectives on the body and on technology. "Technomedical Visions" addresses the formation of MRI’s specific visualities in the first decade of its introduction in Sweden. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how vision with MRI has been constructed in practice in relation to existing ways of knowing the body within medicine. Dussauge investigates first the early decisions that led to a national evaluation of MRI technology in the mid-1980s in Sweden. Then she addresses the shaping of MRI’s quantitative visuality in the practices of radiology, psychiatry and the laboratory, with focus on microhistories at St. Göran’s Hospital, Karolinska Institutet, Uppsala University Hospital, and Lund University. Dussauge shows that whereas authorities’ early decisions momentarily defined MRI as a radiological tool for immediate clinical use and evaluation, a crucial part of MRI’s introduction was the work conducted by MRI-users. These researchers from a range of scientific and medical disciplines performed, over time, a multitude of shapings of MRI’s vision. This studies shows how MRI was made congruent with existing technomedical gazes. The novel MRI gaze was made intelligible within cross-referential networks, and researchers reproduced technomedicine’s existing gazes both in the production, optimization and interpretation of MRI representations. Technomedical time frames, epistemologies and definitions of the normal and the pathological were reproduced and sometimes, re-cast, in the shaping of MRI in practice. This study also demonstrates that anatomy recurrently worked as an underlying frame for the exploration and production of MRI visions. Anatomy’s material visuality provided a site for the production of novel facts at the intersection of existing gazes. Through the practices of shaping MRI gazes, anatomy was systematically remediated, reproduced and reconfigured. / QC 20100714

<p>This licentiate thesis describes and analyses the modern history of the socio-technical systems for urban water supply and sanitation in East Africa with focus on Uganda and Kenya. The key objective of the thesis is to evaluate to what extent the historic processes frame and influence the water and sanitation services sectors in these countries today. The theoretical approach combines the Large Technical Systems approach from the discipline of History of Technology with New Institutional Economics. Throughout, urban water and sanitation service systems are regarded as socio-technical systems, where institutions, organisation and technology all interact. The thesis consists of three separate articles and a synthesis in the form of a framework narrative. The first article provides a discussion of the theoretical framework with special focus on the application of Public Goods theory to urban water and sanitation. The second article describes the establishment of the large-scale systems for water supply and sanitation in Kampala, Uganda in the period 1920-1950. The third article focuses on the politics of urban water supply in Kenya with emphasis on the period 1900-1990.</p><p>The main findings in this thesis are that the socio-technical systems for urban water and sanitation evolve over long periods of time and are associated with inertia that makes these systems change slowly. The systems were established in the colonial period to mainly respond to the needs and preferences of a wealthy minority and a technological paradigm evolved based on capital-intensive and large-scale technology. Attempts to expand services to all citizens in the post-colonial period under this paradigm were not sustainable due to changes in the social, political and economic environment while incentives for technological change were largely absent. History thus frames decisions in the public sphere even today, through technological and institutional inertia. Knowing the history of these socio-technical systems is therefore important, in order to understand key sector constraints, and for developing more sustainable service provision.</p>

Ringdansens bostadsområde som är del av Hyresbostäder i Norrköping miljöanpassades under slutet av 1990-talet. Sopstationer med fraktioner för olika avfall infördes. För många hushåll har detta system inneburit problem. Hyresbostäder vill försöka åtgärdaproblemen genom att göra bättre och tydligare information i soprummen. Genom intervjustudier undersöks hushållens önskemål och klagomål på det nuvarande systemet, den egna hanteringen av sopor samt motivationen bakom deras handlande. Resultaten visar atthushållen efterfrågar bättre och tydligare information. Vissa av soprummen upplevs som skräpiga och ofräscha. Hushållen sorterar mestadels av pliktkänsla samt av ekonomiska och miljömässiga orsaker.

Syftet med föreliggande doktorsavhandling i teknikhistoria är att öka kunskapen om varför, men framförallt hur och under vilka villkor den första elektrifieringen av en statsägd järnväg genomfördes i Sverige. Arbetet med Riksgränsbanans elektrifiering pågick 1908-1917 och var på många sätt ett unikt pionjärprojekt. Två stora tekniska system skulle där komma att sammankopplas med varandra; artonhundratalets mogna järnvägssystem med nittonhundratalets nya elkraftsystem. Riksgränsbanan, den omkring 130 km långa nordligaste delen av Malmbanan mellan Kiruna och Riksgränsen, var världens dittills nordligaste järnväg att elektrifieras och det subarktiska klimatet ställde stora krav på utförandet av tekniska komponenter. Den geografiska lokaliseringen innebar dessutom att de långa avstånden till beslutsfattare inom statsförvaltning och företag måste hanteras. Därutöver genomfördes projektet i en tidsperiod präglad av protektionism, nationalism och internationella konflikter, yttre faktorer som alla också påverkade projektets utformning och genomförande. Att det var Riksgränsbanan som blev den första statliga järnvägslinje att elektrifieras i Sverige berodde på att staten 1907 gått in som hälftenägare i gruvbolaget LKAB och att nya avtal fastställde en ökad brytning och transport av järnmalm, från 1,5 miljoner ton årligen 1908 till 3,85 miljoner ton 1918. Denna mängd kunde inte transporteras inom befintligt system med ångdrift utan omfattande investeringar, vilket innebar att en systemomvandling till elektrisk drift ansågs vara ett bättre alternativ. I maj 1910 beslutade riksdagen anslå 21,5 miljoner kr till projektet som skulle drivas av Järnvägsstyrelsens byrå för elektrisk drift i samverkan med företagen Siemens och ASEA. Kontraktsskrivningen ställde hårda krav på företagen gällande prestanda och utförande och Järnvägsstyrelsen kunde när som helst, senast två år efter övertagandet av driften av banan, besluta att upphäva kontraktet och kräva att företagen återställde anläggningen till ursprungligt skick.Det var en mängd tekniska subsystem och komponenter som skulle färdigställas och sättas samman för att det tekniska primärsystemet ”den elektrifierade Riksgränsbanan” skulle fungera. Speciellt färdigställandet av loken och isolatorerna till ledningssystemet omgärdades av problem som kom att försena projektets färdigställande. Problemen var både organisatoriska och tekniska till sin natur men kunde efterhand åtgärdas genom att det utarbetades bättre rutiner vid korrespondens och annan kontakt mellan aktörerna samt genom att det togs större hänsyn till lokala klimatologiska förhållanden i samband med teknikutveckling. I sin roll som byrådirektör för byrån för elektrisk drift skulle Ivan Öfverholm visa sig vara en stark representant för beställaren och han spelade en central roll för projektets genomförande. Öfverholm kan i detta sammanhang kategoriseras som en offentlig systembyggare som med fast hand styrde projektet. Ibland innebar detta att Öfverholm hamnade i direkt konflikt med företagens representanter men ofta fungerade han också som medlare i de konflikter som ideligen uppstod mellan Byråns och företagens lokala representanter vid anläggningen. Den tvååriga garantitiden inleddes den 1 oktober 1915 och i slutet av 1917 hade nästan samtliga kvarstående arbeten vid anläggningen fullföljts och SJ kunde ta över anläggningen. Slutomdömet om Riksgränsbanans elektrifiering var överlag positivt och 1919 beslutade riksdagen att elektrifiera resterande del av Malmbanan, vilket var genomfört från Narvik till Luleå sommaren 1923. Det banbrytande arbetet i den norrländska ödemarken med att elektrifiera Sveriges nordligaste järnväg var därmed avslutat. / <p>Godkänd; 2012; 20120221 (roiwik); DISPUTATION Ämnesområde: Teknikhistoria/History of Technology Opponent: Dr Mats Fridlund, Institutionen för filosofi, lingvistik och vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs universitet Ordförande: Biträdande professor Kristina Söderholm, Institutionen för ekonomi, teknik och samhälle, Luleå tekniska universitet Tid: Fredag den 20 april 2012, kl 10.15 Plats: A1547, Luleå tekniska universitet</p>

Energy issues have always been on the global economics and geopolitics agenda, even though energy sources have been changing over time. In recent years, the awareness of Arctic offshore oil and natural gas development has escalated, yielding economic opportunities and incurring risks. The offshore Arctic is one of ‘edges’ of the global petroleum industry. The importance of these oil and natural gas resources extends beyond regional and national boarders and local economies, as these activities have become a key geopolitical, economic, and social concern. In an attempt to shed light on this growing issue, this thesis outlines the Arctic is a link in the global energy system and shows how it plays a special role. The aim of this research is to provide deeper insight into offshore hydrocarbon development activities in the Arctic. Historical approach is applied as a main conceptual framework to provide a critical link of past to the present in order to explore the origin and intensity of these activities in the Arctic. This licentiate thesis presents the results of an ongoing doctoral research project. The study provides several insights into Arctic offshore oil and natural gas resources development in the global context via an analysis of the relevant investments and technology from a country-by-country and historical perspective in the maximum period time frame between 1920 and 2025. The two papers included in this thesis explore the impact of investment and technology. This research project illustrates the importance of several factors influencing the Arctic offshore oil and natural gas production and highlights the most promising areas for cooperation at the industrial and global level. The implications of the study results can be useful for identifying and emphasizing the factors that influence offshore Arctic hydrocarbon resource development and investment trends, as well as making assumptions regarding future development. Topics for further research are discussed and refined relating to the ongoing study and the conceptual framework presented. / <p>QC 20150407</p>