Toward a Theoretical Foundation for Experience Design in Tourism

This article aims at providing a theoretical framework for the practice of experience design in tourism drawing from a comprehensive review of literature from different disciplines relevant to tourism as a design context. Three fundamentals in tourism experience design are suggested: human-centeredness, iterative designing process, and a holistic experience concept as an outcome of designing. These call for four approaches to experience design in tourism: naturalistic inquiries and empathic design to target experience narratives, participatory design involving tourists at every stage of designing, integrative design research that include explorative, generative, and evaluative research as essential parts of designing, and the orientation of concepts and theories from multiple disciplines as applied to tourism contexts. Finally, tourism experience concept is elaborated into meta-concept, representing the value propositions of tourism destinations, and operational concept that allows for the orchestration of design elements within tourism destinations to allow for and facilitate desired experiences.