Smart Tangible City Map.: Promoting Sustainable Urban Tourism with Physical Mobile Interaction.

Micheel, Isabel

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2012

2012-05-24

69 pages

The present project sets out to investigate whether novel technology can provide persuasive incentives to promote and implement strategies towards a more sustainable urban tourism. To find answers to this problem state- ment, recent related research areas were reviewed, rang- ing from sustainable ICT to climate persuasive services, physical mobile interaction using NFC technology, and fi- nally three state of the art projects that explored different ways of digital augmentation of tangible city maps. As a result, a prototype of a tangible, reusable city map em- bedded with NFC tags that allows communication with a mobile guidebook application was developed as a kind of climate persuasive service. The prototype was evaluated based on the main problem statement which was further broken down into three eval- uation goals: general usability, the users’ appreciation of having both a tangible artifact and a digital application as well as the marketability of a more sustainable urban tourism. A small user study with tourists was conducted in the city center of Copenhagen. Results indicate that, apart from usability issues resulting from the "floppy" map material, the participants’ overall response towards the concept was positive, regarding both the sustainability strategies it embodies as well as its hybrid tangible/digital nature. In order to validate the problem statement, a larger study allowing proper hypothesis testing and some material im- provements on the prototype will be necessary, but the current study definitely indicates great potential.

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