UCLA Information Studies Seminar

Swedish IT-User Centre:
Promoting User-Centered Approaches for Useful and Usable IT and Services

Anders Hektor
Swedish IT-User Centre

Thursday, April 10th, 2003, 3pm-5pm
GSE&IS Building, Room 111
(just west of the Research Library)

Abstract: The Swedish IT-User Centre, Nita, has been created to support user-oriented development of information and communication technologies and IT-based services. By bridging gaps within and between the research community, industry, and the public sector we expect to improve access to useful and usable IT and IT-based services for large groups of professional and home-based users. During its first years Nita has proved to be an important opinion making and networking organization. Nita has spurred discussion on the field of IT-use and IT users among a large number of stakeholders. The talk will introduce the motives, approaches and results of Nita's work.

Anders Hektor took his PhD at Linkoping University, Sweden, in 2001. His dissertation, published as "What's the use? Internet and information behavior in everyday life", studied the everyday uses of information systems and the Internet by ten information users. The book offers a model of everyday uses of all kinds of information systems and empirical data on information behavior. In preparing the book, he spent spring 2000 as a guest at the IS Department at UCLA. Since 2002 Hektor has been director of Nita, the Swedish IT-user centre. Putting research findings to work and spurring a user-oriented development of IT is of Anders' greatest interest these days.

Everyone is invited.