Rethinking Virtual Places

How would the humanities change if we grappled with the ways in which digital and virtual places are designed, experienced, and critiqued? In Rethinking Virtual Places, Erik Malcolm Champion draws from the fields of computational sciences and other place-related disciplines to argue for a more central role for virtual space in the humanities. For instance, recent developments in neuroscience could improve our understanding of how people experience, store, and recollect place-related encounters. Similarly, game mechanics using virtual place design might make digital environments more engaging and learning content more powerful and salient. In addition, Champion provides a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explains how they help, hinder, or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places. Perfect for humanities scholars fascinated by the potential of virtual space, Rethinking Virtual Places challenges both traditional and recent evaluation methods to address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate and engage with the notion of place.

How would the humanities change if we grappled with the ways in which digital and virtual places are designed, experienced, and critiqued? In Rethinking Virtual Places, Erik Malcolm Champion draws from the fields of computational sciences and other place-related disciplines to argue for a more central role for virtual space in the humanities. For instance, recent developments in neuroscience could improve our understanding of how people experience, store, and recollect place-related encounters. Similarly, game mechanics using virtual place design might make digital environments more engaging and learning content more powerful and salient. In addition, Champion provides a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explains how they help, hinder, or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places. Perfect for humanities scholars fascinated by the potential of virtual space, Rethinking Virtual Places challenges both traditional and recent evaluation methods to address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate and engage with the notion of place.

As Place Branding has become a widely established but contested practice, there is a dire need to rethink its theoretical foundations and its contribution to development and to re-assert its future. This important new book advances understanding of place branding through its holistic, critical and evidence-based approach. Contributions by world-leading specialists explore a series of crucially significant issues and demonstrate how place branding will contribute more to cultural, economic and social development in the future. The theoretical analysis and illustrative practical examples in combination with the accessible style make the book an indispensable reading for anyone involved in the field.​

Place branding as a field of research is still in a state of infancy. This book seeks to address this, offering a theory of place branding based on the tourist experience, keeping in mind the roles of stakeholders, both public and private organisations and DMOs in managing the place brand. Place Branding: Connecting Tourist Experiences to Places seeks to build a customer-based view of place branding through focusing on the individual as a tourist who travels to undertake a memorable experience. The place is the key creator of this experience, which begins well before the travel-to and ends well after the travel-back. Individuals choose the places where to go, collect information on them, ask for advice and suggestions from fellow travellers, give feedback when they come back and talk a lot about their experience, spreading word-of-mouth. The book enables readers to understand how the tourist experience can be managed as a brand. Readers are exposed to a variety of problems, methodological approaches, and geographical areas, which allows them to adapt frames to different contexts and situations. This book is recommended reading for students and scholars of business, marketing, tourism, urban studies and public diplomacy, as well as practitioners, business consultants and people working in public administration and politics.

Through an interdisciplinary approach combining the concepts, methods and tools in language and discourse studies and insights from marketing and tourism research, this book examines the online place branding of Hong Kong, one of the most visited cities and well-known spots in the world. The book compares how the place brand is officially constructed and conveyed by the institutional bodies, as realised on the Brand Hong Kong website online, with how the place brand is publicly experienced and perceived by individuals around the world, as realised on the TripAdvisor Hong Kong travel forum online. The book also includes comparative analysis between Singapore and Hong Kong to provide better understanding of online place branding and findings from the comparative study identify interesting similarities and differences between the official portrayal of the place brand of Hong Kong and its public perception in the digital realm, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore in online place branding. The book also offers evidence-based suggestions on how we can bridge the gap between the online representation and perception of a place brand and how to enhance online place branding in general.

Place branding is often a response to inter-place competition and discussed as if it operated in a vacuum, ignoring the needs of local communities. It has developed a set of methods – catchy slogans, colourful logos, ‘star-chitects’, bidding for City of Culture status etc. – that are applied as quick-fix solutions regardless of geographical and socio-political contexts. Critical views of place branding are emerging which focus on its unexplored consequences on the physical and social fabric of places. These more critical approaches reveal place branding as an essentially political activity, serving hidden agendas and marginalizing social groups. Scholars and practitioners can no longer ignore the need for more responsible and socially sensitive approaches to cater for a wider range of stakeholders, and which fully acknowledge the importance of resident participation in decision-making. The contributions in this innovative book set out to introduce new critical ways of thinking around place branding and practices that encourage it to be more inclusive and participatory. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of branding, critical marketing, and destination marketing as well as critical tourism and environmental design.

This book addresses the importance of human factors in the design of artifacts and systems that serves contemporary individual and societal needs. It reports on cutting-edge, multidisciplinary design research and practices fostering creativity, interaction and co-creation, sustainability, digital development, mobility, as well as science and education. Gathering contributions to the first edition of the AHFE 2021 Affiliated Conference on Human Dynamics for the Development of Contemporary Societies, held virtually on July 25-29, 2021, from USA, this book, which brings together experts with different design and human factors engineering as well as user interface and user experience backgrounds, offers a timely perspective on the role of human factors and design in the developments of modern society and is expected to foster new approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Strategic communication is becoming more relevant in communication sciences, though it needs to deepen its reflective practices, especially considering its potential in a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. The capillary, holistic and result-oriented nature that portrays this scientific field has led to the imperative of expanding knowledge about the different approaches, methodologies and impacts in all kinds of organisations when strategic communication is applied. Therefore Strategic Communication in Context: Theoretical Debates and Applied Research assembles several studies and essays by renowned authors who explore the topic from different angles, thus testing the elasticity of the concept. Moreover, this group of authors represents various schools of thought and geographies, making this book particularly rich and cross-disciplinary.