The maptelling as an embodied protocol for tourism design: A pilot study on Sardinia (Italy)

In the contemporary era, tourism research increasingly focused on the tourist experience, in response to the growing diversification of tourism typologies and the different forms of performance enacted by visitors. This shift was accompanied by an emphasis on the relevance of accessing territorial specificities and local identity in order to engage with realities that differed from the logic of mass tourism. Consequently, it has been recommended to identify paradigms capable of addressing such an emerging practice by leveraging communicative mechanisms that tourists could perceive as appropriate and engaging as conspecifics. This work presented a pilot study conducted in Sardinia (Italy) to test maptelling, a research methodology that combined storytelling and mapping as shared human activities to foster connections between visitors and residents of the selected destination. The activity was included within a NRRP-funded technology transfer project operating across the entire island, with the objective of supporting a form of tourism grounded in territory needs and in the respect of local inhabitants as key stakeholders. Based on the paradigm of embodied cognition, the study introduced a first prototype of geolocated, community-based storytelling. Further research is going to aim at assessing its replicability as a user-centred, non-representational model suitable for phygital tourism.