Reading the landscape: the development of a typology of literary trails to inform experiential design

This article explores the under-researched field of self-guided trails. The focus of the research is on the experiential aspects of self-guided literary trails from the perspective of both the developer and user. An examination of existing literature on self-guided trails and literary tourism was undertaken and supplemented with a review of experiential design principles. Content analysis of a sample of literary heritage trails was then carried out and three distinctive typologies were developed, informed by aspects of experiential design. The research reveals that few literary trails developers utilise these principles and the article concludes with proposals for the design of more effective literary trail experiences.

Lost in Translation, book review of Urban Landscape Perspectives

In Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's characters find themselves culturally stranded and oddly mismatched as an improvised tourist couple in contemporary Tokyo. This is an urban landscape that they cannot comprehend but only temporarily experience, in a fragmented and surreptitious way that allows no possible understanding and categorizations, but offers physical inclusion, emotional participation and momentary embeddedness.