User-centred design for creative tourism prototyping: the Maribor experience.

Abstract This chapter discusses how the principles of usercentred design and emotional mapping can be used to help tourism and culture practitioners design prototypes of creative tourism experiences. Creative tourism is a novel interpretation of cultural tourism that incorporates within the tourism experience the dimensions of active participation, creative self-expression, learning, and community engagement (Duxbury and Richards, 2019), underlined by an immersive connection to place. On one hand, to create successful creative tourism experiences, it is important that the tourism experience designers empathize with the end users/participants and identify with their needs and motivations. By adopting a user-centred design approach, this empathy can be achieved in practical ways and then included in the design of the final tourism experience. On the other hand, emotional mapping deepens engagement with places, fostered by a multisensorial immersive exploring exercise that challenges participants to link places to their own emotions and feelings.