ABSTRACT
Experiences are intangible, so the question arises of whether or not it is at all possible to design them. Not only do the tourism business or the site management of, for example, famous attractions contribute to designing ‘tourist experiences’, so do travel agencies, transport companies, hospitality providers, local shop keepers, volunteers, and so on and, perhaps most important, as recent research in tourism emphasizes, the tourists themselves. Tourist experiences are produced, performed and consumed not only at famous attractions and destinations but across a variety of spaces away and at home, watching television, skimming books and guides. In this chapter, we discuss how design practices are, and can be, approached in recent developments of theoretically informed tourism research including ethnographic studies of tourist practices. One of the central problems is that analytical research into tourist experiences (the ‘why’s and ‘what’s of research) has not – yet – been fully integrated into the practical enterprise of planning and staging tourism (the ‘how to’). In recent years, tourism studies have examined such contingent and complex conditions concerning how tourist experiences are performed (Bærenholdt et al. 2008; Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen and Urry 2004; Haldrup and Larsen 2009).
