Service design for Rural Heritage Tourism

‘i am not a tourist’. – Why collaborative service design may be the key to developing sustainable cultural & rural visitor economies, with the help of ICT, social media and crowdsourcing Abstract: This paper will outline how the practice of Service Design can facilitate the creation of sustainable cultural and rural visitor economies, with the help of ICT, social media and crowd sourcing. This paper is not written to be ‘value-neutral’, but is motivated by the author’s belief that academic activism in tourism ‘must be with the communities and not for them: solidarity is the basis where our common concern is mutual empowerment, self-determination and emancipation.’ (Hales et al.,2013, p17) The aim of the paper is to identify how Service Design and its processes, such as co-creation, have the potential to develop cultural and rural tourism economies, which are community centric and allow the often-narrow role of the tourist to be humanised and democratised. Service Design will be discussed on the on the basis that ‘Design has shown itself to be an efficient way of improving a business’s profitability at a practical level, but when we recognize its capacity to transform environments and people’s lives, it also becomes a catalyst for social change.’ (Viladas 2011, p26) The paper will touch on the need for a democratically supported strategic framework, which ‘incorporates a broader set of values beyond economic growth’ (Hales et al., 2013, p12), and that design thinking has the ability to effect economic and cultural sustainability through co-creation and technology. Service Design thinking can be help define values and identities, that further the concept of tourism in a societal and economic context, by taking advantage of opportunities created in the digital realm by crowdsourcing and social media. The knowledge base of the author’s professional background is design and advertising, and the paper will aim to make sense of this knowledge in relation to sustainable tourism. In the latter part it will focus on the island of Crete to discuss how some of the Service Design and Advertising principles may be applied in practice and why a holistic service design strategy may be particularly suitable for community centered cultural and rural tourism on Crete.