Toward a Theoretical Foundation for Experience Design in Tourism

Abstract

This article aims at providing a theoretical framework for the practice of experience design in tourism drawing from a comprehensive review of literature from different disciplines relevant to tourism as a design context. Three fundamentals in tourism experience design are suggested: human-centeredness, iterative designing process, and a holistic experience concept as an outcome of designing. These call for four approaches to experience design in tourism: naturalistic inquiries and empathic design to target experience narratives, participatory design involving tourists at every stage of designing, integrative design research that include explorative, generative, and evaluative research as essential parts of designing, and the orientation of concepts and theories from multiple disciplines as applied to tourism contexts. Finally, tourism experience concept is elaborated into meta-concept, representing the value propositions of tourism destinations, and operational concept that allows for the orchestration of design elements within tourism destinations to allow for and facilitate desired experiences

An Airport Experience Framework from a Tourism Perspective

“… Based on the above, a strong emphasis on intense and real elements can be included by using support from multisensory elements, which enhance the concept of the tourist experience (Quan & Wang, 2004;Wang, 1999). The strong emphasis on the importance of the senses also makes it important to incorporate concepts such as the sensescape or hyperreality in order to stimulate the emotions and affect tourists (Murray, Foley, & Lynch, 2010;Tussyadiah, 2014).  Binkhost and den Dekker (2009) conclude that the specific character of the tourism experience is derived from the tension between everyday life and other realities that are experienced as a result of changes in one's habitual temporal and spatial structures.…”

“…The former uses the psychological element to explain the nature and result of an experience and is defined by Larsen (2007, p. 15) as "a past personal travel-related event strong enough to have entered long-term memory".  Research on the tourist experience also discusses personal involvement leading to learning and transformation (Aho, 2001;Ritchie & Hudson, 2009), as well as its interpretation through social and cultural interaction (Morgan, 2007;Tussyadiah, 2014), which leads to the idiosyncratic emotional stage after the consumption experience is complete. Now, many of these elements are observed in many airports.…”

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“…Thus, in (1) internal search for opportunities for improvement as well as in (2) finding 'second-generation' collaboration opportunities, it is vital that organisations no longer focus solely on the current structures in their facilities and on the optimisation of their processes. It is necessary to focus on customer aspects of process design (Tussyadiah, 2014), in which it does not matter where the company's frontier is, but what the entire experience of the targeted customer should be.…”

Battle royal in biotechnology: R&D vs. product vs. process innovations

“…Finally, we add two control variables to the proposed relationships in Figure 1 (intangible character and growth): i) Intangible character: Most of the literature on innovation has focused on manufacturing, but there are differential characteristics on the part of services that are necessary to be considered in innovation research (Camacho and Rodriguez, 2008;Criscuolo et al, 2012;Zach, 2012;Tussyadiah, 2013). In fact, Tether (2005) empirically finds, in his analysis of 3,014 European firms found in the Innobarometer Dataset, that service companies have a different innovation orientation from manufacturers.…”