Globalisation is the process of the world becoming more interconnected as a result to the increase in cultural exchange and trade between different countries.
From globalisation as the starting point of this project, it branches off to the many aspects of cultural diversity, eventually leading to my topic, Cultural Tourism.
Within cultural tourism, I have explored several issues in regards to the relationship between the host countries/ communities and the tourists themselves.
(Brainstorms Using Post-It Notes)
(Visualise the thought process through using mind map)
But What is cultural tourism?
According to Melanie Smith (2010:30), cultural tourism can be defined as a type of tourism that focuses on cultural attractions, activities and practices, allowing the exchange of different cultures and gaining cultural experiences, hence celebrate cultural diversity. Which are the major motivating factors for cultural tourists to travel. There are also sub-sectors within cultural tourism, including the heritage tourism, arts tourism and indigenous tourism.
All the research leads up to my own narrative on cultural tourism. Cultural tourism is already the trend in the travel industry which leads to longer stay. Long stay leads to increase in quantity of tourists, whilst lowering the quality of their travel experiences not to mention the decrease in quality of life/ community in host countries.
In this design project, I intend to create a design where it recreates that time and space constraint resulting in lowering the damages done to the host community and the improvement in travelling quality.
My initial idea was to visualise time to recreate the time constraints. However, this is not sufficient enough to express my narrative, which leads to my final design.
The finalised idea is a wearable/ attachable device where it tracks the users’ (which will be tourists) time and location, using instant feedback collected from the local community to determine the flow/ amount of tourists.
The main functions of Watcher are:
a) Visualises Time – Provides an alternative method to create time constraint
b) Visualises Crowd/ Flow – Provides real-time feedbacks on how congested the area is to creates space-constraint
