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The National Park Service strives to connect the natural and cultural resources located within its national parks to the visitors that experience them. These connections must be on personal, meaningful levels to fulfill the agency mission. Within this thesis, an analytical framework entitled the Mission and Meanings Triad Model (MMTM) is proposed to examine the process of "meaning formulation" in a national park setting. The MMTM takes into account the interdependent nature of three mission-driven factors: the park's resources, interpretation, and the visitor experience. An audience-centered perspective is emphasized within the model to ensure that the end result is the meaningful connection itself, rather than merely an "interpretive opportunity." To illustrate the MMTM, an analysis is undertaken of Crater Lake National Park and its interpretive offerings during the summer 2013 and winter 2014 seasons. Through this field and document analysis, multiple recommendations regarding the improvement of interpretive components are suggested.

<div>The rising inactive lifestyle highlights the need to find efficient ways to tackle this worldwide lousy habit. Conventionally, polices of resolving healthy issues such as smoking and overeating focus on providing regulations and information, drawing on the assumption that people will change behavior when they consciously realize the harms and benefits. However, policy interventions have only shown limited success. On the other side, nudging, which assumes people act subliminally and aims to steer people in the right direction without limiting their freedom of choice, is suggested as a promising approach in lessening healthy issues. However, nudging interventions have not received sufficient attention in research so far, especially with regards to walkable designs that lead people to intend to walk instead of taking motor vehicles. </div><div><br></div><div>To bridge this gap, innovatively, the present study incorporates nudging techniques into walkability design. Nudging techniques include priming, salience, and norms. Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance. The present study primed participants with walking shoes in advance, expecting they have higher intention in walking in later experiments. Salience bias predisposes individuals to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable. In order to generate salience bias, sidewalks of a street view on a black-and-white sketch were highlighted with colors. Then, the study displays the sketch with colored sidewalks to participants, expecting those with salience bias have a higher intention to walk. Norms are typical patterns of behavior, generally accompanied by the expectation that people will behave according to the pattern. The norm in this study delivered the information that most tourists are walking, expecting a participant who received the information will act consistently with the majority. </div><div><br></div><div>The research is based on a carefully designed online questionnaire with scenario-based experiments where participants imagined to be tourists. Research results reveal: 1) priming with walking shoes has significant effects on inspiring people to walk, 2) salient sidewalks nudge people to walk and warm colors like red even have more potential in encouraging walking, and 3) descriptive norms have potent effects on nudging walking, especially when added with identification information. Further, three mediators were identified to bridge the effect of salience on walking intention, namely visibility, excitement, and enjoyment. Visibility represents how noticeable the sidewalks are. Excitement indicates colored and un-colored sidewalks bring expected exciting or boring experience. Enjoyment is the degree of pleasure that participants perceived when imaging to walk on the sidewalks. Collectively, visibility, excitement, enjoyment, prime, and norms together play crucial roles in nudging people to walk. Additionally, females, exercise lovers, and hospitality and leisure industry workers tend to have higher intentions in walking while traveling. </div><div><br></div><div>Theoretically, the thesis adds new knowledge to interventions and deconstructions of tourists' walking intentions. Additionally, the study contributes to the refinement of descriptive norms and the literature of social comparison. Practically, the study implies that wellness resources need to be easily noticed by the public so as to make optimal use of healthy support. It also alarms tourism practitioners that besides improving tourists' health, wellness resources can become a pull factor of the tourist attraction and thereby bring tourism economic benefits.</div>

Destination image is acknowledged as a key factor in destination choice and visitor satisfaction. However, despite thirty years’ research from a variety of perspectives into destination image and image formation, the impact of actual visitation has been largely neglected and understanding of the processes involved in that change is therefore limited. Visitor experience is increasingly recognised as being unique to the individual, leading to calls for research strategies taking into account the visitor’s perspective. This study uses a phenomenological approach to investigate visitor-destination interactions, capturing visitors’ lived experience as expressed in their holiday narratives. Applying a double hermeneutic approach to analysing interview data, this study outlines the elements of destination experience and shows how the meaning encapsulated in the individual’s destination image is mediated by his/her stock of knowledge, the particular combination of predispositions, motivations and characteristics, as well as by their in-destination interactions and encounters with people and place. It develops the ideal typifications of Gourmet, Grazer and Gourmand to help explain the complex and dynamic interaction between visitor characteristics and behaviour and extends our understanding of the role of other tourists in destination experience by illuminating tourist-tourist interactions and revealing the compromises necessitated by the presence of other tourists. By generating insight into the complex and dynamic interaction between anticipations, motivations and predispositions, and the way in which this interaction affects the visitor’s experience of people and place in a destination, the study has demonstrated the utility of the phenomenological approach in understanding visitor interactions. It has also resulted in a model which explains the processes whereby the visitor makes sense of his/her experience and transmits that experience to others. This can be used by academics and practitioners to further understand the benefits and attractions of existing destinations and to predict the attraction of potential destinations, as well as to promote greater understanding of tourist-host interactions among destination industry providers.

<p>Visitors’ expectations of museums in the modern world consist of both utilitarian and hedonic aspects. Given visitors’ diverse expectations and demands, traditional museums have taken actions to attract more visitors. Taking advantage of new technologies is the current action and trend in the museum industry. The emergence of digital museums is the reflection of this tendency, which use digital technologies such as projectors, surrounded sound, ambient lights, and multisensory cues to present a virtual environment. In the virtual environment, emotional state and sense of presence are considered to be useful to provide a more engaging experience. Therefore, this research empirically investigated digital museum visitor experience perceptions and the influence of emotional state and sense of presence on experience perceptions. The different impact of multisensory cues on experience and the relative mediation effect were also examined.</p> <p>Data were collected with a scenario-based online survey conducted through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). A split-sample approach with a total of 382 respondents was used for analysis. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to explore visitor experience perceptions of the digital museum. Structural equation modeling was used to discover the impact of emotional state and sense of presence. One-way analysis of variance was used to compare the difference in impact of multisensory cues on overall visitor experience. This research also employed the PROCESS macro in SPSS for demonstrating the mediating effect of emotional state and sense of presence through the impact of multisensory cues on overall visitor experience. The findings of this study revealed three experience perceptions—respectively, joviality, personal escapism, and localness experiences—of digital museums. Also, this research presented the positive effect of emotional state on joviality experience and negative effect of emotional state on localness experience. In addition, a notable positive impact of sense of presence on joviality, personal escapism, and localness experience perceptions was found. No significant effect of emotional state on personal escapism was found in this research. Moreover, visual and auditory cues together were confirmed as the most powerful indicator for triggering the greatest experience level. The impact was found to be valid due to the mediating role of emotional state and sense of presence.</p> <p>This research contributed theoretically and practically to museum literature and experience research. Theoretical implications were discussed to indicate this research as the framework to measure digital museum visitor experience based on the proposed three-factor structure. Practical implications were provided for museum managers. Limitations and future research were discussed.</p>

Houses and the objects within them stand as tangible symbols of human memory. Some memories are created unconsciously in day-to-day living; others are consciously attached to objects that are cherished as symbols of other places, relatives and friends. Memories may seem to be lost until they are rediscovered in moment of involuntary recall, triggered by an object, a smell or taste. The purpose of this research project is to investigate the memory experiences of visitors to a house museum; what they do with those experiences and how important they are to them. Forty adult visitors to Calthorpes' House in the ACT were interviewed using the focused interview technique with a framework of questions that allowed for a conversational style and additional questions. The interviews were recorded and later transcribed. The results showed that all visitors reported experiencing memories during their visit to Calthorpes' House. Many people found those experiences enjoyable and wanted to share them with others. These findings are important because they can inform the set-up, interpretation and publicity of house museums in ways which will attract new visitors and help to engage with visitors' interests when they visit house museums.

The modern disconnect between agricultural producers and consumers in Canada is a result of an increasingly smaller percentage of society taking part in the ‘making’ of food. Fruit breeding —the practice of selectively breeding two fruit varieties to create a genetically superior offspring— is a scientific process found at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland, B.C. Canada that orchardists use to produce more while investing less. This thesis attempts to reveal the fruit breeding process by establishing an architectural procession through the agricultural landscape in order to reconnect consumer and producer. Further, the design of this thesis explores the development of an architecture of place in order to establish a deeper connection with the fruit breeding process for the visitor.

This thesis proposes an architecturally integrated stormwater system and research facility in the town of Wasagaming, Riding Mountain National Park (RMNP), Manitoba. The design proposal provides four-season, interior and exterior space for the integration of resource management operations and park visitor experiences. Visible integration of infrastructure, building and landscape cultivate destination-based travel to RMNP while reducing human impacts on the ecosystem. Aging infrastructure and diminishing federal funding make responsible ecological and cultural management of parks increasingly difficult. Integration of research and tourism as a component of visitor experience at parks is one way of addressing cost-effective co-location of programme, ensuring future funding can be generated for resource management.