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Most are active in several high-level international networks. This guarantees that the activities of the SIG will have ample resonance in the broader scientific community and will be published in international journals. Objectives The overarching aims of the group are thus:. Key topics The SIG will engage with a large variety of topics concerning space and place, mobilities, performance and bodily practices in tourism, among which:.
Participants have been offered the possibility to attend both at a discounted price. The program of the SIG meeting involved: Methods and Applications o Dissonant performances in tourist places: In total 19 papers have been presented by mostly young scholars from 9 countries. This meeting has also provided an opportunity to talk openly and frankly about the way forward and the next steps for this SIG.
After some attempts they give up, and began approaching Bob and Alice more directly. Both parties then used shouts of encouragement, and finally Bob and Alice succeeded. Isa asked Alice whether Guy should help, and together they began working on extracting the milk from the coconut. In Copenhagen, an encounter was staged between a young American tourist travelling independently to Denmark and four local students from Copenhagen Business School, recruited from a class on Social Informatics. This conversational thread occurred in the context of both sides explaining how they came to be where they were when they met.
This was in stark contrast to the local Danes who took some pride in the perception of Denmark as a liberal, open-minded, and tolerant culture. The telling demonstrated a lived familiarity, done with a sense of satisfaction that reflected an overt feeling of pride in being part of such a tolerant society. The follow up workshops with both parties consisted of collaborative design exercises where the locals and the tourist were asked to come up with suggestions for technologies that would mediate encounters with tourists. This took the form of an imaginary device that combined a wide range of networking activities with semi-automated journal-type logging actions as well as a dynamic information service.
The hands-on workshop with the four locals was conducted using dialogue around a table as a driver for motivating design suggestions. The dialogue revolved around two overarching themes. On the other hand, if a local has friends or people they are in a relationship with visiting, they would actively assist them in trying to avoid iconic sites and what they perceived to be tourist traps. The discussion also touched on the problem of talking to tourists.
Book description: Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost Tourism. Between Place and Performance. Edited by Simon Coleman and Mike Crang. Many accounts of tourism have adopted an almost paradigmatic visual model of the gaze. This collection presents an expanded notion of spectatorship with a.
The locals particularly emphasized how Danes are introvert and unlikely to interact overtly with people they do not know. The second theme discussed was the importance of getting local insight to facilitate good experiences. The locals then began to picture themselves in the role of tourists, using their own tourist experiences as drivers for imagining how a technology could create experiences transcending the dependence upon iconic sites in the city.
Their design was a device that would interact with digitally enabled souvenirs, e. Also, the digital souvenirs could interact continuously with the places they represent, so that both locals and tourists who are still at the particular place could capture or create new sounds or videos that would be streamed to the appropriate devices. They emphasized the fleeting or glimpse-like character of the service, noting that interaction with the device should be peripheral and ambient rather than a focused activity.
They further emphasized editorial control over what content to receive and share, whilst retaining a notion of serendipity and randomness. These concerns are distanced from everyday life, and, in particular, from work. Thus, through social interaction, the place evolved, not as a place of quiet, natural, and unspoilt beauty, which is how local brochures tend to describe Magnetic Island, but as a place where an intense but short-lived and ephemeral social interaction was played out.
The meeting entailed no promises or evocations of lasting friendship, and no transactions or reciprocity was expected from Bob and Alice once Guy and Isa were allowed into the playful setting. The Coconut Beach encounter revealed the experience as fundamentally social, exemplifying how the meeting between the two couples came to be choreographed and performed in place. The collaboration played a central role in making place, enrolling a range of objects from the environment sticks, trees, and coconuts , human artefacts the van, a piece of string, a knife and socio-cultural actors the two couples, mutual expectations based on knowledge about social norms for interaction, established tourist behaviours.
The example showed how both collaboration and social interaction are part of the negotiation and construction of places in tourism. Embodied performances in place are key in this process. Guy and Isa, who demonstrated an interest in catching coconuts by gradually moving closer to Bob and Alice, appeared to indicate their interest in interacting.
Not unlike examples given by Goffman on how body language is used to communicate and uphold mutual definitions of a situation, the parties at Coconut Beach used their bodies as props to help project their social orientation and their openness. A large part of the interaction in the Copenhagen example revolved around an elaborate performance of local cultural aspirations, such as the laid-back and liberal alcohol and drug consumption, as well as relaxed attitudes towards religion.
While Lawson and Jaworski use the example of how economic inequalities motivate communication between British visitors and Gambian hosts, the interactions in Copenhagen entailed none of the transactional features of communication where narratives are exchanged for monetary gain. For example, the conversation around Christiania focussed on the difference between the two cultures, with the locals drawing upon familiar to them embedded social and cultural furniture.
Following up on the meeting with the tourist, one of the locals, who had served as a Queens Guard at the Royal Castle, told a story of silently standing at attention whilst tourists discussed where to go. Several times, when tourists mentioned that they would like to visit what he perceived to be an overrun tourist attraction, he had wished he could intervene with advice. Thus, whilst the interactants were more or less equal in economic and social standing, the locals were continuously asserting cultural inequalities or differences.
The American tourist made a number of observations about her prototype during the construction, debriefing following the workshop, and an excursion to demonstrate the prototype: An integrated device, since being a tourist was not just a sequence of discrete activities, but rather a processual flow of interactions that might involve way finding, information seeking, problem solving, experience recording, updating followers back home such as friends and family, and social interactions in the locale, with a number of these threads being maintained simultaneously.
She indicated the need for ownership over the information generated. Thus, for example, if what was a casual connection with another person was made in the immediate locale, then the default state would be that the connectivity would fade over a relatively short period of time, and that to persist, some positive action would have to be taken by both parties.
That part of the purpose of the device was to capture some of the essence of being a tourist in a direct manner that afforded the persistence of the otherwise transient experience whilst also maintaining more immediate contact with the folks back home. These indicate some design goals that transcend current thinking in relation to designing for tourists.
They attend to a desire for resources that draw upon the lived experience of tourism rather than provision of information services, guiding, and problem solving. The locals in the design workshop initially debated a notion of authenticity, expressing the occasional frustration when tourists were observed to be mindlessly visiting sites that were perceived to be iconic or overrun. Thus, the experience of the local environment was enriched through the particular sensibilities that tourists perform when they visit.
What, beyond informational practices such as navigation, wayfinding, guiding and accessing info about sights, might coalesce into mobile tourism IT in the age of near ubiquitous data networks? Thus, whilst the classical tourist places are still ripe with meaning and emotional impact, tourist intentions and expectations, tourist itineraries, and the sites where tourism is performed are becoming increasingly complex and diverse. Simon Coleman , Mike Crang. Please use quotation marks for searching phrases e. After consultations with Elgar Publ. Activities see more details.
The examples from the fieldwork presented above demonstrate that tourist places are not simply stable containers of products or meanings. They entail an elaborate and collaborative making-of-place that unfolds through embodied and social interactions. Places may be constructed as nodes of local culture such as in the Copenhagen example , or they might be, first and foremost, more reserved enclaves where tourists are the agents of place making such as in the Magnetic Island example. However, tourism does not simply happen inside a structured space. It takes place and it requires a particular performed kind of engagement, drawing on the possibilities afforded by the geography as well as the cultural, social, and technological contexts.
We can understand tourist places as similar to dramatic stages whereupon embodied and social performances are played out. While there is scripting taking place, in the form of physical things , social e. The workshop with the American tourist in Denmark and Danish locals emphasized that tourist place making can be ephemeral and fleeting, consisting of a number of different interactions that take place simultaneously.
Activities may be planned, but our workshop participants stressed the value of serendipitous and ephemeral encounters and activities, and the way in which connection or networks with places need not be a highly focused activity, but could take place through ambient media that supports affective recollection and story telling.
Drawing on the conceptual work, our explorative fieldwork and the two workshops, this section will attempt to isolate three significant challenges to appropriate technological approaches to, and future interventions in, interaction design for tourism.
The design of technological interactions in place has the possibility of fundamentally changing the fabric of places. In the examples of different technological interventions outlined above we saw how technological concepts and applications were appropriated to challenge implicit assumptions about the nature and practice of tourism. In our brief and selective outline of tourism research literature, we emphasized the power of tourism as something that shapes cultures and sociabilities.
At the same time, seeing tourism as a mutual reshaping in place should not be approached as inherently problematic. As our accounts from the field studies and the workshops suggest, social interaction and relations performed in place are central to some of the core experiential agendas of tourism. With regard to this view, locals or strangers are not incidental human furniture in tourist places, but crucial resources for performing tourism.
Place as a Resource for Designing Tourism Technology. Case studies are drawn from diverse types of tourism and destination focused around North America, Europe, and Australasia. The approach resonates with ideas in anthropology, sociology, and geography Berghahn Books Bolero Ozon. Between Place and Performance.
Simon Coleman , Mike Crang. The Poetics and Performances. The Scottish Highlands as Spectacle.