Exchanging Touristic Information between City Tourists

This technical note is based on Bram Braat's master's thesis, written as a Industrial Design student at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The project was conducted at the User Experiences group in the context of the Hospitality project. The goal of this student project was to design a product or system that creates social interaction between people in a (semi-)public place. In this case to let tourists exchange experiences with each other in a hotel lobby. Tourist carry a lot of touristic experiences, for example information about nice restaurants, bars, best visiting times of museums, current events, unknown sights etc. Currently there is not much exchangeof this information while advice of other tourists appeared to be given more value than information by guiders or the tourist information. Based on this, a literature review towards social interaction in public places and an analysis of the context several concepts were created for systems that would enable social interaction between tourists. Throughout an iterative process these concepts were evaluated and developed using scenarios and experiential prototypes. This iterative process had a high user involvement with several user evaluations. This resulted in a final concept called the CityTIP system, where TIP stands for: 'Tourist Inspiring Pictures'. This system enables tourists to share their touristic photos with other guests as well gives them inspiration for exploring the city. The CityTIP system has been evaluated in a lab test to investigate thesocial interaction and general acceptance of the system. Based on these results a setup for further research is proposed, a setup for a more extensive lab test and a setup for a field test in ahotel lobby of a real hotel.