This research identifies key criteria for designing mobile applications for cultural heritage tourism, aiming to provide a planned, engaging, and functional solution that enhances the visitor’s experience and strengthens the competitiveness of destinations in the absence of technological tools for promotion and management. The city of Riobamba was selected as a case study due to its significant potential for this type of tourism. The proposed method is structured around three main dimensions: interpretative, inclusive, and immersive. The methodology combines a literature review, benchmarking, and user-centered design. The findings highlight the importance of integrating heritage storytelling, structuring information by levels based on user profiles, addressing the demand for practical data, and complementing digital resources with physical signage. The model is replicable if the tourism demand is adapted to the local supply of each destination.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a fundamental role in today's educational processes, especially when the virtualization and digitalization of social spaces for teaching-learning is shown as an irreversible trend after the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the objective of the research was to reflect philosophically on the teleological sense of ICT as tools for human development in Higher Education in Ecuador. Methodologically, the research used a hybrid approach that combined on equal terms phenomenology, which describes the phenomena as they presented themselves to the consciousness of the research team, with dialectical hermeneutics that interprets the meaning of the symbols and signs of ICTs in their dialectical relationship with human development and higher education. It is concluded that if we start from the assumption -following a benevolent line of argument that ICTs are consubstantiated to the phenomenon of human development-, it must be emphasized that the development of human capabilities is a political problem, of creation of objective conditions and; ontological, of the way in which the being unfolds its intrinsic potentialities, which can hardly be reduced to scales of measurement.

La gastronomía tradicional constituye una manifestación relevante del patrimonio cultural inmaterial, al integrar saberes, prácticas y valores transmitidos generacionalmente que configuran la identidad territorial. En la ciudad de Riobamba, diversos platos tradicionales forman parte de su memoria colectiva y de su oferta turística; sin embargo, la ausencia de un sistema gráfico estructurado limita su representación visual y su proyección cultural. El presente estudio tuvo como objetivo diseñar un sistema de signos gráficos representativos de la gastronomía tradicional riobambeña, aplicando análisis semiótico, principios del lenguaje visual y fundamentos del diseño andino. La investigación se desarrolló bajo un enfoque cuali-cuantitativo, combinando revisión bibliográfica, observación directa en el Centro Histórico Patrimonial, análisis simbólico de nueve platos emblemáticos y síntesis formal mediante retícula y proporción andina. Posteriormente, los signos diseñados fueron validados a través de encuestas dirigidas a ciudadanos y expertos, evaluando reconocimiento, claridad y pertinencia cultural. Los resultados evidencian que el sistema gráfico logra coherencia formal, identidad visual unificada y eficacia comunicativa, permitiendo su aplicación en señalética, rutas turísticas y material promocional. Se concluye que la traducción visual de la gastronomía tradicional fortalece la identidad cultural y contribuye a su visibilidad dentro del contexto urbano y turístico de Riobamba.