From Bovine Horde to Urban Players: Multidisciplinary Interaction Design for Alternative City Tourisms

This paper tells a story of an international and multidisciplinary atelier-based design experiment. For ten days in Rome, the ‘White Group’ explored a cyclical process of fieldwork and intervention, critical reflection, design concept generation, and prototyping to generate two novel and situated forms of technologically-mediated city tourism. We wanted to ‘re-design’ experiences of city tourism - both for visitors to a city and for the people who live there – and to do that we needed to experience the city ourselves. Inspired by Situationism and sociological ‘breaching’ experiments, we ‘played’ in the city in order to design something intimate for the people in it. In doing so, we contribute to existing research on technology and tourism, as well as offering creative ways to approach other projects.