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Serious gaming is an interdisciplinary and co-creative research methodology, which allows participants to proactively engage in role-playing and co-creating strategies. During the gameplay session, various game mechanisms trigger individual, social, and collective learning outcomes of the players, which in the end can lead to a change in the individual belief system towards the subject. Despite demonstrating its applicability in other complex domains, such as maritime spatial planning or urban development, an investigation into the applicability of serious games within the tourism domain is scarce. In conceiving the process of tourism planning as a strategic plan with dependent actors, resources, objectives, and challenges in a multi-layered decision-making process, creating or re-creating such strategic games can be beneficial to promote the understanding and change of belief systems among stakeholders. A particularly critically question is how serious gaming is able to generate qualitative research inquiries in order to shed more light on the complexities of the tourism destination planning process. Destination planning research can profit from new disruptive methods, such as serious gaming, for a more experimental and explorative approach in understanding the interconnectedness of tourism stakeholders, as well as estimations of short and long-term impact of decisions on a destination. By enabling strategic conversation about tourism planning issues, serious gaming functions as a strategic learning tool that provides opportunities for individual and community learning. Besides practical and conceptual implications, a set of future research avenues are provided that will enhance the qualitative research paradigm.
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Due to the need to present information in a fast and attractive way, organizations are eager to use information visualisations. This study explores the collision between the different experts involved in the production of these visualisations using the model of trading zones supplemented with the learning mechanisms found in the boundary crossing literature. Results show that that there is not one single good solution to effective interdisciplinary cooperation in the field of information visualisation. Rather, all four types of cooperation that we distinguish – enforced, dominated, fractionated, and attuned – might work well, as long as they are adapted to the situation and the participants accept the constraints of the specific cooperation type they are engaged in. In any case the involved experts and initiators have to understand and incorporate approaches that enhance the cocreative, iterative nature of the production process. In surveying the different forms of collaboration we detect two major forms of trading zones: the one that encompasses the collaboration between an external client and a designer (external trading zone) and the trading zones within an organization between content producer and designer (internal trading zone). Both mechanisms of identifying each other’s expertise and coordinating the different tasks in the production process seem beneficial for the production process.
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