Modelling behaviour in guided tours to support the design of digital mobile city guides

Type of session: Short paperMobile learning landscape

Heloisa Candello Lyn Pemberton

The use of mobile devices to provide context-dependent information to tourists and other city visitors is now an activity that fits well with the paradigm of informal mobile learning

• Context and properties (Paay & Kjeldskov, 2005)

• Implications of the natural, non-computer-mediated behaviour of tourists (Brown & Chalmers, 2003).

• Behavioural Impacts of Mobile Tour Guides (Kramer et al, 2007; Kaasinen, 2005)

Initiatives

We concentrate on a new perspective, drawn from the interaction of tourists with a (human) tourist guide.

The work forms part of the requirements elicitation phase of a project to investigatedesign issues for audiovisual culturalheritage guides for the informal learner in cities such as London, Edinburgh andBrighton.

Purpose

• Identify aspects of cultural and historical walking tours that might be relevant to design of digital guided tours.

• Participant Observation

• Access – e-mails and letters toguides and Festival Manager

• Sample – not specially selected24 visitors & Three guidesAge 20 – 55 years oldResidents

The Tours

Postcards - visitors received a postcard explaining the research and providing the contact information to send by post or give back to the researcher.

The Tours

Distributed to 24 visitors. Received 17 (=70%) back)

The Tours

Three informal walking tours, where the cultural, historical, artistic and social aspects of the cityscape were explicated on the move.

Brighton Fringe Festival, on the south east coast of England.

The Tours

• St Nicholas’ Church talk and tour

• Historical Central Brighton Tour

• Brighton Rock Guided walk

The Tours

Technical resources Camera & audio recorder

Human resources Two researchers – one to record, one to take notes

Finance Under £50

Time Approx. 2.5 hrs per tour

Resources

No pre-existing model.

Aspects – Guides behaviourVisitors - behaviour/ characteristicsContent – structure, level of complexity,

assumptions, lengthInteraction – questions, commentsContext – surroundings, reference to past, other places.

Analysis

Results

• Tours are multimodal and multidimensional

• Mobile guides can help in this task

Implications

• Follow up activity, in which a group of volunteer “tourists” will take part in a professionally-guided tour and subsequently form focus group to discuss their experiences.

• Questionnaires- post cards

Limitations and next steps

Heloisa Candello Lyn Pemberton

Interactive Technologies Research Grouphttp://www.brighton.ac.uk/cmis/research/groups/itrg/

Thank you