Victim Support in a Changing Welfare State

This article discusses how new kinds of individual needs develop parallel to the changes in the welfare state. From a study of Victim Service in Sweden it is shown how this organisation has grown parallel to the changes in the welfare state. In the empirical material it is also shown that the need of support often comes from secondary victimisation. Those who are helped by Victim Support are often people with loose bonds to society and people of low class. As victims they can get help from Victim Support, but the need derives from lacking service in the welfare state. NGOs has replaced organisations in the public sector at the same time as the neo-liberal conception of crime, threats and risk has replaced the social democratic ideas of social security.

Virtual Reality as a Support Tool for Ergonomic-Style Convergence

The competitive industrial context compels companies to speed-up every new product design. In order to keep designing products that meet the needs of the end user, a human centered concurrent product design methodology has been proposed. Its setting up is complicated by the difficulties of collaboration between experts involved inthe design process. In order to ease this collaboration, we propose the use of virtual reality as an intermediate design representation in the form of light and specialized immersive convergence support applications. In this paper, we present the As Soon As Possible (ASAP) methodology making possible the development of these tools while ensuring their usefulness and usability. The relevance oft his approach is validated by an industrial use case through the design of an ergonomic-style convergence support tool.