Tourism, Peer Production, and Location-Based Service Design

This paper describes characteristics of information and service design by exploring the needs and motivations of tourists. Tourists are expected to be important and demanding users of location-based services. They will need customized means to filter their experience of destinations, as well as ways to meaningfully participate in the creation of narratives and histories about different places. Mobile technologies will also allow tourists to be more discriminating in their patronage of different service offerings, especially as they gain greater knowledge of so-called "backstage" processes. These demanding needs will require choreography between services offered by many different commercial, cultural, educational, and community providers. The paper suggests approaches to deliver tourist location-based services based on low barrier of entry principles of web architecture. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the erosion of backstage/front-stage distinctions in service systems impacts service innovation.