Conference Agenda

Monocultures of identical K-12 classrooms proliferate from the Sahara to the Himalayas, and they certainly remain the norm in the United States. Yet evidence suggests high teacher dissatisfaction and low student engagement. Can re-imagining existing school environments powerfully engage students and teachers, without rebuilding them from scratch?

Proposed here are schools delivering visceral experiences supported by diverse environments. These schools would be physically re-organized as communities of practice, with like-minded teachers working together in workspaces that build community, promote identity and support collaboration. When teachers surrender their private classrooms, those spaces can diversify to more powerfully support teachers in engaging students.

What could these rooms become? Nine categories of learning spaces are identified, generating 60 spatial archetypes to replace identical classrooms with a diverse ecosystem.

What broader lessons for design management stem from this work? Compared to the templates and precedents often referenced in design, the arch-typological approach presented here offers tremendous benefits:

• Adding depth: contributing deeper research over a timespan independent of immediate project-driven concerns.

• Reducing risk: ensuring the outlines of an approach without eliminating agency, and local variation.

• Focusing design effort: defining the field of play to concentrate energies on the unique aspects of the problem at hand.

Cultural tourism is a fast-growing segment in the tourism industry and is estimated to be around 40% of the tourist segments globally. After COVID-19, this has come back with renewed force. Regional attractions such as experience centers, museums, event developers, city developers, tourism offices, and so forth need to work together to create enough “reason-to-go” and subsequent “reason-to-stay” experiential qualities in their tourism service value propositions.

Through two larger cultural tourism case projects, we investigate how one can bring ecosystem tourism stakeholders together through codesign tangible methods to ideate on cross-locational experiential service value propositions and what opportunities and difficulties seem to emerge through this. In the first project, three regional museums and a tourism destination office worked together to find shared themes and connected stories. In the second project, seven Second World War museums, three tourism offices, and design developers collaborated to extract three experiential journeys that visitors could follow.

We illustrate how a series of codesign interventions can engage a cross-disciplinary circle of stakeholders and lead to novel insights and shared understandings, establish common ground, and generate ideas with potential. In addition, we analyze the use and effect of introducing codesign methods that can support the development of shared themes and stories attracting visitors and international tourists. Through observations, video recordings, and interaction analysis, we outline both the opportunities and difficulties found in these collaborations.

The opportunities point to the possibilities in providing an attractive offering through a series of connected stories that involve the value chain of travel, food, and accommodation providers and in training the front personnel to guide to the next places. The difficulties point to issues such as the gap between stories as marketing and the stories as they are experienced on location and the difficulty in aligning practices according to a central story line and overall service value proposition across various distances and time.

From the perspective of experiential service design, the results have theoretical implications because a holistic service flows through cross-locational and cross-organizational touchpoints while the practical implications also point to the development of ecosystems of tourism actors working closely together.

The paper aims to review the use of empathy beyond sensemaking and focus on empathy as an essential principle for measuring people's readiness for digital adoption. Led by the discipline of design management, this research project seeks to inquire how empathy-led methods can be embedded in the research design to identify and measure people's readiness in the pre-adoption stage of digitalisation.

The paper demonstrates the application of empathy in identifying the psychological variables that affect readiness for digital adoption in the pre-adoption stage. The findings are from a systematic literature review that identified the psychological, emotional, and intrinsic variables in individuals that influence people's readiness to adopt a digital tool. These variables are grouped and selected to articulate the perception of the usefulness of technology and the feeling users attach to that technology in the pre-adoption stage of digital technologies. The result is creating an empathy-led approach to how these variables influence people’s perception of digital technologies and what readiness means for individuals.