A Participatory Platform Supporting Awareness and Empathy Building Between Tourists and Locals: the Ha-Vita Case Study

In this paper, we describe the conceptualization, design and preliminary evaluation of Ha-Vita, a participatory platform populated with video interviews about nature and biodiversity preservation, designed primarily for tourists and visitors of a popular Touristic Island destination. The content was selected to raise awareness towards environmental sustainability related. As a strategy to engage the public with the local biodiversity, we envisioned to foster interaction between tourists and locals. Evaluating our strategy with tourists revealed itself to be a research challenge on its own. Nevertheless, our results shed light on content creation and design choices of the platform, as well as reflecting on the methodological challenges of conducting HCI research with real tourists in situ.