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What does a place Schladming want to get out of participating in a project like Experimedia? Their purpose as a tourist city is to manage the affect structures of visitors, both before, during, and after the visit to the site. How does technology contribute to that? If negative affects are created by lack of information, technology can provide this, but this is not the whole story. The purpose of information technology in this context is instead often to create an interactive narrative of affect-generating experiences for the tourist to structure their visit around, just like a business will model a customer journey to manage their affect registers during the whole experience and avoid negative affects to arise. The problem is however that the technology aimed to facilitate this---from booking systems to navigation and recommendation tools---are often the source of these negative affects. Technology itself needs to be self-reflecticely studied during its own development process. Hence the need for prototyping, iterative design, living labs and testbeds. These are at least implicitly based on an understanding of technology as self-reflective socio-technical systems.
In the case of the tourist city this is also clear in technology's role in providing the visitor with the opportunity to self-reflexively experience their own enjoyment through photo and video and have that self-reflexively of enjoyment reflected back to them through interactions in social media or in the enjoyment in other people's faces.
Tourism is not primarily about mobility but of a special way of relating to materialities where matter and space are experienced as charged with affective meanings. With projects like Experimedia, places like Schladming becomes not only a site for attracting visitors but also a place for experimentation, innovation and the production of economic value that brings its own kinds of mobilities.
With Schladming as a case, we are looking specifically at urban sites as testbeds within the tourist city and its primary concerns with the affective registers of visitors.
Tourism still relies on human contact in the service offer. Partly this is because human contact is an end in itself as part the tourist experience---to be cared for or to meet "real local people"---but it is also because the human sensorial apparatus is much more attuned to modulations in the affective register. Empathy---on behalf of employees within the tourist services towards the customers (of which they are expected to have the capacity for at all times)---are a superior instrument for registering affective states and adapt service offers to them, however it is disadvantaged from an economic point of view since it is not subject to economies scale and thus increase in relative cost in comparison to fixed capital. Any delegation of this sensibility from employees hybrids of machinic assemblages and the self-management by the customer of their own experience have a great economic advantage. On the one hand "big data" and algorithms, on the other "free labour".
The idea of the technology platform, such as in the Experimedia case, are a key aspect of this bringing of the gap between affect and service offering. A technology platform allows entrepreneurs with their ears to the affective ground to externalise their fixed costs in time and resources and decrease the time it take so go from concept to implemented idea. A number of these platforms already exist for code libraries (github), computational resources (amazon), payment systems (paypal), distribution platforms (Apple app store, Google play store, Steam) that allows app developers and startups to get off the ground without large fixed capital investments. What projects like Experimedia is doing is taking this idea to give access to the city through a combination of testbed and living lab methodology.
It is clear here that the role of the curator or the designer is a better metaphor than the modernist notion of engineering (of affect). The designer as "the cautios prometheus" [@latour:2008cautious]. The notion of care as a socio-technical construct is also actualized in the tourist situation. This notion of care involves a constant monitor of the state of some entity and the constant adaption and modulation of it and its environment, but while still recognizing this entity as an active and autonomous being with its own ability to act in the world based on sensing the environment. Of course, despite its warm and fuzzy associations, care is far from a neutral and innocent practice. It makes assumptions of what is desirable and normal and involves claims to know what is best for someone better than themselves.
Tourism is a special form of product that has a special relation to ICT that needs to be taken into account.
Consumption of tourism takes place in the future and the consumption of the tourism coincide with the production itself. Tourism is therefor not something a consumer can inspect before purchase. Therefor, meta-information about the experience and trust in the supplier is crucial for the decision of consumption.
The quality of the tourist experience is defined by the interaction between the supplier and the consumer. This is the tourist experience; it is not external to it. ICT therefor is not an informer about the tourist experience, but is part of the experience itself. If the ICT mediated interaction with the supplier is perceived as troublesome and disturbing, the whole experience is perceived as such. On the contrary, if the experience of getting the information is perceived as meaningful in itself -- such as asking a local for the best restaurant in newly learned German instead of looking it up online -- this provides value to the whole experience. The act of getting information and unlocking a destination by learning more about it as one goes along and discovers things through experience is thus part of the construction of a narrative that makes the tourist experience meaningful and valuable.
Because of these factors, tourism has always been characterized by a high degree of informality. It is also labour intensive and relies a lot on the know-how and social networks of individual actors. Tourism has never been Fordist and streamlined like many other industries. Tourism is characterized by a high degree of ad-hoc solutions and on-the-spot improvisation since the tourist experience is produced at the same time as its consumption, and one could argue that it is always produced in collaboration with the consumer (which in that case would become a prosumer).
Schladming needs to balance their perceived traditional authenticity with attracting tourists and hosting events.
ICT has also made the experience of going to places like Schladming more conencted to everyday life. With ICT one can be reached for work and share expperiences via social media.
Tourist cities are moving from providing static information (about offers, sites and historical information) to providing dynamic information (of places of interest, where something is happening now, user recommendations etc.)
Schladming has a problem with matching desire and offer in real-time since the spatial distribution of tourist services are either too localized (all centered around the main square) or too distributed (half-an-hour with bus away) to allow for spontaneous managemnt of affect.
A tourist city is already augmented and trying to direct affective attention with signs, posters and the planned layout of spatial attention such as placements of shops and cafés or tourist services in the vicinity of spectacular natural environments.
Schladming is also being standardised by the multi-national tourism, booking and hotel companies whose systems one needs to be connected to in order to have a change to be chosen among the many available destinations
The participation of experimedia is however a sign that there is a desire for at least locally adapted ICT and not just relying on social media platforms and standardized systems.