New Tools for Visitor Experience
By Federica Busa, Robin McGowan & Mark Woodward
Imagine this scene: a solo traveller lingers in a quiet courtyard, sketching in her notebook. A few meters away, a family with three children negotiates their next stop: ice cream or playground? Do their backgrounds matter? Yes, but not in the way traditional design often assumes.
“… experiences emerge from the dynamic relationship between people and the affordances of space, the latent opportunities for action, emotion, or meaning that a setting offers.”
Audience understanding is the foundation of any meaningful experiential project. While persona-based approaches help clarify broad expectations, they are only part of the picture. The real challenge lies in recognising when we are designing for defined user segments and when we are addressing a truly diverse public, one that includes many motivations, moods, and modes of engagement. A businessperson may seek quiet reflection just as much as a solo traveller. A teenager and a grandparent might both be drawn to beauty, comfort, or surprise.
Illustration: © 2025 Mark Woodward
This is why the conventional tools of persona mapping and visitor journeys, staples of spatial and narrative planning, can fall short. The visitor journey, often mistaken for the experience itself, maps a linear route through space: a curated sequence of moments, messages, and transitions. It is a functional tool to organise content and support orientation. But the journey is not the experience, no matter how many layers of “storytelling” we add to it.
Experiences are lived. They are shaped by pauses, unexpected encounters, and personal interpretations. They emerge from the dynamic relationship between people and the affordances of space, the latent opportunities for action, emotion, or meaning that a setting offers. Confusing the journey for the experience can lead to environments that are navigable but emotionally flat, legible but unmemorable. People don’t follow paths in a straight line; they respond, improvise, and drift. They don’t consume places; they negotiate with them.
Designing only from predefined user types or fixed routes underestimates both the shared human needs that are common across profiles and the variability within them. It doesn’t capture the nuance of real experience, which is intuitive, emotional, cognitive, and social all at once.
The Power of the Journal
This is why we introduce a different concept: the journal. A term we use intentionally to reframe how we understand, capture, and design for lived experience. If the journey gives it structure, the journal gives it soul.
A journal is a personal, nonlinear, and multidimensional record of interaction with a place. It reflects how people actually move through environments: pausing, skipping, revisiting; following curiosity, emotion, or chance. Attention, energy, and mood change throughout the day, and the journal captures this evolving pattern of states and activities revealing not only where someone might go, but how and why they connect along the way.
A journal is not a route. It is a memory map. It reflects meaning built through emotion, curiosity, and agency. Like a physical journal, it holds micro-stories: an unexpected connection, a quiet moment of awe, the impulse to return.
“I was just passing through, but the smell of the herbs pulled me into the garden. I stayed an hour.”
“Every visit feels different—some days I notice the artwork, other days I just sit and listen.”
In the context of design, the journey is plan that ensures spatial logic and accessibility; the journal captures the richness of experience: what is felt, discovered, and remembered.
The Value of Journals in Design
The concept of a journal can be easily dismissed as too subjective or soft; a counterpoint to the clean logic of operational planning. The journal is a structured framework grounded in cognitive science and semantic theory which are disciplines that help us understand how people assign meaning to their surroundings: how spatial qualities can be interpreted, how attention can shift, how emotional or cognitive memory is formed.
In other words, journals are built on affordances: the elements that suggest what a space allows, invites, or implies. These are not abstract. They are physical and perceptual features, real design elements such as texture, light, material, sound, spatial rhythm, content. They shape how people navigate and attach meaning to a place, often without conscious thought.
Journals are not a softer alternative to journeys. They are a necessary complement. Where journeys help organise content and flow, journals help humanise space. Together, they offer a more complete vocabulary for designing environments that are functional, inclusive, and alive with meaning.
Spaces designed with journals rather than journeys alone tend to be more inclusive, generous, and open-ended. A playground is not just for children, it signals joy and playfulness. A quiet garden is not just for the elderly; it is a refuge for anyone needing calm. A community wall or storytelling bench becomes a place where different people connect.
To embrace journals also means wholeheartedly rejecting the language of “consumers” in experiential design. Public spaces are not retail channels; experiences are not products; visitors are not consumers: they are participants in an unfolding dialogue between place and perception.
This is a fundamental mindset shift that underpins public environments that feel shared, meaningful, and generative. It invites us to focus on connection, memory, and meaning as design outcomes. The experiential value of a place, which is mostly captured in footfall data, lives in the individual, lasting impressions that surface long after someone has left.
In a world that rewards speed and numbers, which are also important, journals help us design for something deeper, and more human. Let each person leave not with a checklist of what they have seen, but with a hihgly rewarding journal of what they have felt, discovered, and remembered.
To be continued….
Discover more meaningful, scientific and emotive approaches in which we explore Journals and apply them to the art of visitor experience.
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