Hello everyone and welcome to this session. The title is Assessing the Disturbance from
Overcrowding in Outdoor Nature Experiences. I’m going to start by asking you a question.
Have you ever been anywhere outdoor with the idea of enjoying nature just only to find
yourself surrounded by more people than nature? If you have ever experienced anything like this,
then you have not been the only one. It was a reality before COVID-19, when mass tourism
was indeed a global reality. For example Iceland, which is the country where I live and where this
work was carried on, saw a drastic increase in the number of visitors just in a matter of few
years. Typically the assessment of overcrowding is done through questionnaires; you provide
questionnaires or interview the visitors after they have been visiting a particular location,
imagine for example a national park. We wanted to take a different approach. We
wanted to tackle this problem space by taking an interdisciplinary approach and our idea was to
leverage on some wisdom learned from User Experience Design and Exploratory Research. And
starting by reframing the problem a little bit and looking at both overcrowding and
nature as experiences, particularly overcrowding being a disturbance to the nature experience. We
thought that the best way to asses overcrowding, instead of doing some passive monitoring,
was to involve actively the people visiting the particular natural location and put them
into a position where they could self-report, moment-to-moment and in context, their perception
of overcrowding. In order to do that, we had to prototype a new device in order to support our
experimental approach into assessing overcrowding. Here is the device. It’s this little box that can
fit into someone’s hand. This is a portable device and through this device a visitor can
record her subjective perception of overcrowding. The way it works is that this device is recording
its location and its time moment-to-moment, and this device comes with only two buttons.
Through these two buttons a person can report whenever she feels that there are too many people
at the park or whenever she feels that the people are not that many, the place is too isolated.
So after prototyping this device we were not happy. We wanted to see how we could use it
in a real life scenario. What we did was to do a field study at Thingvellir National Park. It took
us about 9 to 10 days and we were able to recruit roughly 66 participants into the field study.
Here you can see an example of the type of data that we can extract from one of these
devices. Once the device is given to a person, the person carries on the device with her through the
entire tour of the national park. We can see where the person pressed the button to report
that a location was feeling as overcrowded. This is for one person and something very interesting
happens when we aggregate all these type of data for all the participants in the study.
This is a cumulative view of where the people, the 66 participants in the study, felt that the
areas were overcrowded. Here below we can see the same data but represented as a heatmap,
where it becomes pretty evident what locations in the park should actually require extra attention.
In order to reinforce our confidence that we got some valuable results out of this field study,
we wanted to investigate if there were any correlations between the number of people
at the park, at any given time, and the number of times that the participants to the study reported
a perception of overcrowding. So we could find this correlation that reinforced our confidence
that the device was indeed capable of allowing the people to self-report this particular perception
of overcrowding, on a moment-to-moment basis. At this point we felt, for example with the previous
visualization and this correlation, we felt that at this point we got some deeper view into the
phenomenon of overcrowding at Thingvellir National Park. However we thought that overcrowding is not
a static phenomenon. Overcrowding is a perception of something dynamic that changes over time.
So what we did was to actually create a special UI - to design a special UI - to be able to
visualize this dynamic nature of the perception of overcrowding from the visitors that participated
into the field study. So what we did was to create a visualization where we have a 3D representation
of the national park; this is Thingvellir national park in 3D and these are the paths that you
can follow if you come and visit the park. And below here you can see that there is a timeline
with a scrubber, so that you can move through time back and forth.
And as you move back and forth through time you can see how the perception of overcrowding,
recorded through the devices, changes. And by matching those changes with important factors on
the arrival of the visitors, we thought that park managers, architects and stakeholders in general,
would have an instrument to actually dive deeper into this phenomenon and taking better
decisions for what concern future infrastructure or modifications to current infrastructures. And
with this I conclude. I thank you for watching this presentation and I welcome you to the Q/A
session. I’m looking forward to it, it could be an opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into some
of the aspects that I could not cover in such a short presentation. Thank you for watching.