Development of a design toolkit for memorable and meaningful smart tourism innovation

The tourism experience and its contribution to tourists’ wellbeing are important considerations in tourism development. Many travelers deliberately seek meaningful experiences on their journeys. Recent academic research in tourism and positive psychology recognize this as eudaimonia: experiences are intrinsically valuable and significant, hence memorable and meaningful to tourists. Furthermore, offering eudaimonic tourism experiences can create a more sustainable tourism service. Smart technologies often play roles in supporting such a transformation. Although both design thinking and service design adopt a user-centered approach, current methods fall short of addressing experiential factors and implicit personal factors pertaining to eudaimonia. Using culture tourism as the context, this study comprises two stages: the first stage identifies explicit experiential and implicit psychological dimensions about the eudaimonic tourism experience. Then, the second stage, as a result of this collaboration, incorporates insights into the development of a design toolkit.