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This paper examines a set of metaphors for describing, understanding and characterising the Mobile Internet. The metaphors are a result of extensive user studies in the US, Hong Kong and Europe in the late 2006 and early 2007.In these studies, we explored the user experience related to the Mobile Internet through in-depth contextual interviews with over 40 users, including a group in the US, which was deprived of their standard Internet PC access for several days. Our analysis of the collected data resulted in six metaphors that can be used as powerful creative tools in designing Mobile Internet applications.

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Young girls are a user group often neglected in the design of technical devices. In this paper, we describe a method for involving pre-teen and teen girls in a concept design process. With this target group we have experienced serious challenges in applying traditional participatory design methods, such as observations or interviews. As a solution, we have adopted a web-based storytelling environment where our target group is encouraged to create usage scenarios of a mobile terminal that would support their activities in a virtual community. Our results show that this approach is a very natural and fruitful method of involving this target group in the design process. q

We first introduce a non-adaptive fuzzy logic controller (FLC) for the control of live steam temperature in a coal-fired power plant. For further enhancing performance, we introduce a self-tuning method for the FLC that modifies the scaling factor of one FLC output. To make the FLC more portable to other similar plants and more robust we add another self-tuning mechanism that runs on-line and modifies the membership functions of the fuzzy rule set. We have used the meta-rule approach in the tuning mechanisms. The performance of the FLC is compared to a cascade PI controller.