Virtual Tourisms is a project by Megan Kendrick and David Lopez for the “Memories” issue of the Vectors Journal. As written in the Editor’s Introduction, this project uses the lens of a hotel to “examine the cultural imaginary of Los Angeles as seen from a variety of social class positions”. Kendrick utilized the concept of hotels as “manifestations of abstract cultural ideals; a symptom of the collective unconscious of a particular age and geographic region.” In other words, she used Los Angeles hotels as a vehicle to examine the socio-cultural features of the city due to their unique position as a social space with particular interactions and transactions that acts as an intermediary between cultural myth and city representation.
The interface of this website interweaves as a kind of game-like storyline told through a travel album. You open the travel album to begin and are directed to a type of “About” page that introduces the project’s purpose and method of digitization. You then click “Continue” and are allowed to choose a historical character from the 1880s and 1890s to go through the rest of the project as. These individuals are of varying class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds to simulate the complex network of land, labor, and nature in the complex LA tourist infrastructure of the time. You are allowed to read a mini-biography of each given character before you make your selection.
You are then directed to a selection of brochures such as “Why Visit Los Angeles,” “Where to Stay in Los Angeles,” “What to do in Los Angeles,” and one of the “Hotel Raymond” (where the character stays). You are then free to explore these brochures and their different sub-categories.
Those subcategories usually include a representative picture through which you can then choose between three different lenses for a unexpected, behind-the-scenes view: Advertising and Promotion, Built Environment, and Socio-Spatial Practices. Using these lenses, you uncover different layers beneath the representative picture.
Your adventures and explorations are logged onto a feature called “Your Souvenir” which keeps track of what you’ve personally taken interest in and is presented into something of a postcard, which were popular at the time. The postcard symbolizes the process of creating your characters personalized “image of the city” through his/her’s particular journey.
Based on the project’s editorial statement and my own observations, I believe that the designers put in careful and thoughtful consideration into creating this interactive interface in the way that they did. I think they made the design decisions they did because they really wanted to emphasize the construction of alternative spaces (hotels) to suggest the transformations of experience due to differences in geography, time and personal background. By allowing the user to experience this world through a different historical character of their choosing, so many different stories are offered and can be told through this one interface. Their decision of including different lenses to view information through also contributed to the purpose of revealing the different layers of LA society at that time. Through this interface, you see through both literal and metaphorical viewpoints which is what the designer intended for the user to see. The project designers really wanted the user to experience what it was like to be a tourist of Los Angeles during this time period while also giving them an exclusive behind-the-scenes look to add more context and extend the user’s knowledge so as to blur the lines between image and reality.
I believe that this project’s design was quite successful in communicating its purpose. Through this interface, the user is allowed to learn from the past to construct our own histories while acknowledging the certain limitations of our historical documentation and tools. Unfortunately, some of the information and clarity was lost, as there was no way where you could combine the different stories told into one place that could be compared an contrast. Other than that, this project’s interface definitely brings a whole new meaning to the concept of “virtual tour” and I enjoyed it because of the interactivity and the it possibilities offered.