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This article describes some of many definitions of information design. Practical as well as theoretical aspects are important in information design. It is an applied science. We may view information design, as a “combined discipline,” as a “practical theory,” or as a “theoretical practice.” As an academic discipline, Information Design needs to incorporate theoretical contributions from other disciplines. The principles of information design are universal, and they are not tied to any unique features of a particular culture or language. One internal and six external information design theories are mentioned. Principles become the fundamental sources for development of practical guidelines.

The podcast phenomenon has gained considerable momentum in various educational contexts around the world. For this project we have studied opinions and views expressed by subjects regarding an experimental visual literacy podcast that was demonstrated to subjects in the USA and in Sweden. It was concluded that it is not possible to please all subjects in a diverse audience. The intended audience must be carefully identified, and the program designed to cater for specific needs. Information design principles regarding legibility and reading on screens can be applied to the design of video-podcasts for education, information and training purposes.

This paper discusses the problems and possible solutions for making a project place Web site to be used in a multinational research project. The most important function of a project place Web site has in our case proven to be a file archive. It enables all members of the project to share and access important information and research results. Since the file archive is most important it has shown to be a good solution to make it the central part of the project place Web site. Additional features can then be designed as complements to this central feature. It appears that the site is used rather sparingly between meetings with an average of only one login per day. At the time just before a meeting the site traffic has increased as the members are uploading files to be reviewed at the upcoming project meeting. It is pretty safe to assume that the traffic on the project site will drop during the meeting and then increase right after the meeting when project members will start to share information and research results that has been discussed during the meeting. As time goes by the traffic will probably drop to a low level again when the groups will continue their appointed tasks each on their own.

The need for information about recycling and garbage disposal is increasingly epressed. The research perspective implemented in this study provides the Information designer with a set of questions regarding the information context. This stidy conerns three contexts: inner context, close context and external context. It was found that informants consider the close and the external context as the most important for promoting desired recycling behaviour.

Det här dokumentet innehåller en diskussion om begreppet design, om designutbildningar i Sverige,om begreppen akademiskt ämne och vetenskap, samt ett försök till en systematisk fördelning av existerande områ-den och ämnen inom ramen för begreppet designvetenskap. Denna klassificering sker i huvudsak med utgångs-punkt från syftet med den färdiga designen, vad som skall gestaltas och hur produktionen skall gå till.  

In this paper we compare the first issue (1830) of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet with a current issue on the web,173 years later. There are many similarities between the first “paper newspaper” and the current “paper on the web”.Main differences are the different materials available nowadays, and the animation, the search facility and the interac-tivity afforded by the Internet. However, to some respect this “web paper” is more confusing than the old newspaper.This “web paper” does not utilize all opportunities available for a fruitful interactivity.

Web-based learning is an increasingly popular way to reach out to new groups of students. We have startedto develop distance courses for web-based learning in experimental virtual classrooms. Basically a virtualclassroom is a virtual place to meet. Teaching only a few students communication via e-mail can beenough. With more students in a course we need to have more complex solutions, always located on a reli-able server. The purpose of this paper is to describe our experiences and our process for problem solvingand design of our virtual classrooms. It seems that the organisation and the actual design of the system fordistance education can increase student’s attention, motivation and communication.