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Stories are a fundamental and universal form of human communication and learning [Bruner, Telling stories: Language, narrative and social life. Georgetown University Press, 2010]. People use stories to organise, understand, learn, remember and communicate about the world [Herman, Storytelling and the sciences of mind. MIT Press, 2013]. It is not surprising then that stories have been discussed in literature linked to design thinking [Brown, Change by design. Harper Collins, 2009], design science [Hatchuel, Journal of Management and Governance 5(3):260–273, 2001] and user, consumer and tourist experiences [IDEO, Design thinking for educators, 2012; Battarbee, Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on designing pleasurable products and interfaces. ACM, 2003; Mathisen, Advances in Hospitality and Leisure 8:21–41, 2012]. While stories are often mentioned as elements of design and user experience or as key methods to understand experience, their use as a framework to guide the design process has not been examined in detail. Within the literature on consumer experience stories have been linked to drama and theatre [Pine and Gilmore, The experience economy: Work is theatre and every business a stage. Cambridge, 1999], but this use of the theatre metaphor has been criticized as a unidimensional and superficial treatment of experience [Gelter, Articles on experiences, 2006; Lugosi and Walls, Journal of Destination Marketing and Management, 2(2):51–58, 2013]. This chapter goes beyond both the use of stories as a method of understanding user experience and the dramaturgical approach to consumer and tourist experience to present stories as a framework for guiding the design of tourist experience opportunities. It begins by outlining the parameters of the topic and defining the main concepts of stories and experience. It then analyses the relationship between stories and tourism identifying the major dimensions of tourist stories and their links to design and experience. These dimensions and analysis provide a foundation for a story framework to guide tourist experience design.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42773-7_7

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