Type of session: Short paper

Theme: mobile learning landscape

Authors: Heloisa Candello and Lyn Pemberton

Modelling behaviour in guided tours to support the design of

digital mobile city guides

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 (Abowd et
al, 1997; Cheverst et al, 2000; Kray & Baus, 2000; Schwinger et al, 2003). When developing
requirements for such systems, some have concentrated on the context and its properties (Paay
& Kjeldskov, 2005), while other work has concentrated, in an extension of the implications of
the natural, non-computer-mediated behaviour of tourists (Brown & Chalmers, 2003). Both
these perspectives are of major importance, as is the nature of the information itself; however,
in this paper 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 investigate the graphic and interaction design issues of developing an audiovisual cultural
heritage guide for the casual learner.

In order to achieve a system that would be welcomed by the target user group, we think it’s
necessary to make a close observation of current tourism practices and behaviours. Many
tourists employ the services of a guide, either on a traditional package tour, or, increasingly in
the world of short city breaks, in the form of a small, relatively informal walking tour, where the
cultural, historical, artistic and social aspects of the cityscape are explicated on the move. We
intend to study both types of experience. In order to understand what people expect of cultural
and historical tours and identify which aspects are involved during those activities, we observed,
as participants, three different walking tours from the programme of the Fringe Brighton Festival
in Brighton, on the south east coast of England. The tours were selected on the basis of their
cultural and historical characteristics. The first was a “Historical Central Brighton Tour”, which
provided a general vision of the historical centre of Brighton to visitors. The second was the “St
Nicholas Church talk and tour”, which presented explanations about a specific landmark. Adding
a less architectural and more literary perspective, the third tour was the “Brighton Rock Guided
walk" was the last one, which showed the locations of the film “Brighton Rock” and its original
inspiration, the novel of the same name by Graham Greene.

The exercise enabled us to find out in what sort of information was traditionally delivered to
tourists on guided tours, the questions they asked, the rate and speed of information flow, the
characteristics of those on the tour and their behaviour during the tour. Given the limitations
of the casual observer method, however, we are currently planning a follow up activity, in which
a group of volunteer “tourists” will take part in a professionally-guided tour and subsequently
take part in a focus group to discuss their experiences. Nevertheless, this preliminary fieldwork
has been extremely valuable as a pragmatic device for familiarising ourselves with the cultural
heritage domain and developing a basic framework for visitor and interpreter behaviour.
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