Tourism Experience Innovation Through Design

Abstract

Experience innovation is described as collaborative and integrated in day-to-day work. However, a challenge is to capture people's tacit knowledge and make it explicit, in order to bring forth ideas and concepts. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how design can be integrated with experience innovation. A model for experience innovation and design is presented which complies with the prototyping phase of the design process. Visual representations are used for communication and idea generation between stakeholders, to make them build on each other's ideas. The case is the development of a guided tour in Dunga beach, Kisumu, Kenya. Dunga beach is seen as the experiencescape, where the interactions with the physical and social environment become part of the experience innovation process. By active involvement as partners and participants in collaborative activities with guides, residents and tourists, the authors were able to get an in-depth understanding of how experience innovation took place in Dunga. The implication is that the view of experience innovation as a spiral process within the experiencescape increases the understanding of how specific characteristics of the experience could be considered and developed for new or improved experiences.

Key Words:

• experience innovation
• experience design
• experiencescape
• prototyping

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the test tour participants and all the people in Dunga, with special thanks to the tour guide association Dectta.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

We want to give our thanks to the main funders of the project: SIDA and Mistra Urban Futures and the Local Interaction Platform in Kisumu (KLIP).