Tourism Sociabilities and Place: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Mads Bødker, David Browning

Proposing new design opportunities, this paper challenges received notions of tourism, arguing that tourism is fundamentally social and concerned with making place. This turn makes tourism not only a convenient testing ground for technology concepts, but increasingly also for more sensitive renderings of, and interventions in, tourism as a relational and social practice. Using examples from commercial, arts, and design projects, and providing excerpts from our own fieldwork and design workshops with tourists and locals, this paper outlines three challenges through a conceptual lens that we see as productive for appropriate interaction design of tourism technologies.