Transmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visitors in developing knowledge and awareness about the cultural and natural heritage of Madeira Island. Fragments of Laura (FoL) is composed of two interconnected components: a Location-Aware Multimedia Story, and a Hypermedia Platform populated with locally collected testimonies and interviews. Results from the extensive evaluation of Fragments of Laura, highlights the potential of interactive multimedia, TS in particular, in engaging tourists with the destination values and community. Our contribution is twofold, on one hand we extend on the state of the art of multimedia interactive storytelling, with the description of the Fragments of Laura TS artifact. On the other hand, results from FoL evaluation highlight how the artifact impacts on the tourism experience its implications for the design of future tourism driven TS experiences.

This short paper presents some preliminary results (both quantitative and qualitative) gathered from field trials with three different mobile apps that allow walkers to map urban accessibility barriers/facilities, while wandering around. The three apps were designed based on different gamification mechanisms, respectively exploiting: i) intrinsic (i.e., altruistic) motivations, ii) extrinsic motivations expressed in terms of a concrete reward, and iii) extrinsic motivations expressed in terms of fun/entertainment. These preliminary results reveal that the apps designed on the basis of extrinsic motivations are able to drive users to provide a larger amount of contributions. Interesting differences between concrete rewards and fun used as effective means to motivate contributors are discussed.

While museums are designed to engage and interest various audiences, teenagers are often a neglected segment. Without digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain exciting and relevant to a young, tech-savvy audience. Games can benefit museums by fostering positive attitudes towards museum spaces and creating more joyful destinations to promote meaningful informal learning combined with entertainment. We developed a dual-gamified mobile experience targeted at teenagers, for the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal: a story-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Turning Point) and a game-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Haunted Encounters ). These strategies were studied in depth with 159 teenagers (15–19 years old) to understand how gamified strategies might enhance their user experience in a museum. On one hand, game-based strategies, in which game mechanics predominate, can catch a visitor's attention by displaying challenging questions that promote competition. On the other hand, story-based strategies, in which storytelling is prominent, can promote an emotional connection with the museum and exhibits and facilitate awareness of historical facts by including an engaging plot with high-quality media and tightly edited stories. This article reports on lessons learned that museum experience designers and curators can use in designing enjoyable, interactive experiences for teenage visitors.

In this paper we present the design and implementation of two different game applications, designed and developed in order to extend and motivate the community of mPASS, an urban accessibility mapping system. On the one hand, mPASS relays to collect a sufficiently dense, detailed and trustworthy amount of data. On the other hand, its niche goal somehow limits its natural audience, which is not enough to reach the critical mass of information needed by the system in order to provide effective accessibility maps for its users. To overcome this problem, we resorted to the use of a gamification strategy to develop both a traditional prizing add-on and a novel mobile game targeting young and adults players, aiming to include them into the data contributors community. Design process and development description of both games are presented, highlighting the design iterations of the concepts, motivated by contribution gathered from feedback sessions, focus group and experience prototyping.

This paper describes a tangible visualization that explores the link between the impact of energy feedback on household consumers and the resource demand impact on energy production. Specifically, it positions a novel perspective attempting to move beyond the known limitations of current eco-feedback systems and contributes to enhance our understanding of how consumers comprehend energy production. The work is informed by a comprehensive study of an installation that displays the ratio of current power generation sources and the percentage of grid renewables. The paper provides design insights for creating novel eco-feedback visualizations that leverage the balance between user lifestyles and the desire to influence consumption behaviors and practices. Evaluation results show an increase in energy literacy and awareness as well as identifies high consumer preferences towards simple, representative interfaces and ubiquitous immediate feedback. Our study shows potential in terms of future scenarios for eco-feedback in distributed energy micro-generation and other inevitable disruptive changes for the energy utility.