Experience Design that Transforms Everyday Scenery into Adventure: Design Thinking for Adventure Travel

Target Audience and Specific Challenges
・Target Audience:Personnel in charge of overall tourism content development at national parks, local government tourism promotion divisions, or regional DMOs, or managers of guide organizations.
・Specific Challenges:Following the definition of 'Adventure Tourism (AT)' advocated by the government and local authorities, they have developed tours that combine two elements from the region's 'nature,' 'activities,' and 'cultural experiences.' However, the actual tours end up with guides just talking one-sidedly about their own knowledge. While surveys say 'I learned about the region,' it does not lead to repeat visitors or passionate fans of the area, and no concrete 'behavioral change' occurs at all. They are troubled because they don't know why regional tourism is stagnating despite having built the tours exactly according to the definition.

The Limits of Stamp-Rally Style Tourism That No One Told You About

I have seen many people in charge who are desperately trying to revitalize regional tourism, sitting around desks and having serious discussions with earnest faces.

Flipping through official guidebooks, they fit elements together like a puzzle, saying, 'If it's our region, we can meet the conditions for adventure tourism by combining this rich nature with traditional cultural experiences.' Then, they actually run the tours created in this way.

However, what is happening on the ground is the quiet psychological withdrawal of the participants.

Even though the guide is explaining the data on regional history and plants perfectly, the participants are just politely nodding along while thinking to themselves, 'I hope this ends soon.'

There is a major misunderstanding happening somewhere here.

The formal recognition that adventure tourism is established if two of the three elements—nature, activities, and cultural experiences—are included.

This trend of accepting 'stamp-rally-like combinations' is the biggest reason why the inherent charm of many regions in Japan is being stifled and tourism management is stagnating.

Why is it that even though you think in your head that you have 'combined wonderful elements,' the actual tour only results in superficial consumption behavior?

It stems from not grasping the essence of adventure travel.

Receiving attentive service, just looking at the scenery, and finishing after having a rare experience. This only results in a consumed experience, and it is tourism without empathy that only leaves behind the memory of 'having been there.'

This problem becomes clear when considering the difference between the 'Experience Economy' and the 'Transformation Economy.'

The 'Experience Economy' refers to the stage of providing customers with special events or memories (experiences).

On the other hand, the 'Transformation Economy' that lies beyond that is a stage where the process itself—in which the participant's own values and way of life change (self-transformation) through the experience—is considered the value.

Tourism until now has remained in the 'Experience Economy,' selling special memories.

What modern travelers are seeking is existential significance, where their perspective on things is updated through travel. As long as tourists are treated as mere recipients of services (consumers) and provided with simple recreation, the experience will end as a one-time consumption.

There is a method to solve this problem from the root.

'Interpretation,' or tourism experience design that deepens understanding, is not just about conveying facts. It is a communication system that translates the meanings and relationships behind visible objects and phenomena, bringing new insights and shifts in values to the hearts of participants.

Discard the thinking that 'it's cleared because I included two elements of nature and culture,' and connect the message that the environment holds to the guest's daily life. By designing tourism content that has been given high added value through interpretation and instructional design, you can transform everyday scenery into a supreme adventure without relying on facilities or formal definitions.

The moment you seriously 'confront' nature and 'reinterpret' yourself

The assumption that 'adventure' equals 'extreme sports that challenge harsh wilderness.' From the sound of the word, we unconsciously imagine such intense physical activities.

This is not the only misunderstanding.

There is a common misconception in the field that if two out of the three elements—nature, activity, and cultural experience—are present, it is adventure tourism.

True adventure travel is, in essence, a journey that encourages self-transformation through those elements.

In a space where smartphones don't work and your own common sense doesn't apply, to seriously 'confront' nature and 'reinterpret' your existence and values up to that point.

That may well be the essence of adventure.

And, having guests experience this 'reinterpretation of values through confrontation with nature' during their journey. This is the true form of 'Adventure Tourism (AT).'

When you read official documents from the ATTA (Adventure Travel Trade Association) or the Japan Tourism Agency, it is clearly defined as a 'journey that promotes self-transformation.'

It is not just leisure, but a journey for personal change. Stop ending the experience with just seeing the scenery and saying 'it was beautiful,' and create 'behavioral change' that produces a shift in the participant's inner self.

In other words, to create an experience that remains in memory and changes subsequent actions and values, the guide must stop talking one-sidedly and instead provide 'silence' and 'questions' for the guest to confront nature.

For example, on a tour walking through a forest. The guide stops talking entirely about 'this tree is...' and instead, everyone just places their hands on the tree bark for one minute, closes their eyes, and listens only to the sound of the wind. After the silence, the guide asks, 'In your daily life, do you have time to face just the sound of your own breathing like this?'

In this moment, mere nature observation turns into an existential time to rethink one's own way of life.

Outdoor guides and wilderness instructors should have experienced this transformation themselves and know well what the uncertainty of nature brings. Providing that raw sensation learned from nature to guests as a meticulously calculated process—that is what makes the shift from consumption-based tourism to transformation-based tourism possible.

Techniques for constructing 'adventure' that is an extension of daily life

How do you lead guests into this deep state of immersion using the local nature and culture as a stage?

If you just leave it to them by saying 'please spend your time freely in nature,' guests will only feel lost and anxious. You must stop relying on accidental excitement and construct a sequence of experiences based on the mechanisms of human psychology and behavior so that anyone can reliably reproduce a high level of enthusiasm.

This is where the approach known as 'Instructional Design (ID),' cultivated in the world of educational technology, proves its worth.

Instructional Design (ID) is a design technique that maximizes the effectiveness, efficiency, and appeal of an experience by following human information processing processes to elicit spontaneous engagement and deep immersion from participants.

We are introducing this ID into the field to train guides who can 'draw out experiential value' rather than just being 'guides who explain,' which is necessary for inbound tourism and high-quality tours.

There is a limit to the amount of information the human brain can process at once. No matter how much you bombard people with difficult explanations while they are moving or mesmerized by a new landscape, their brains will simply crash.

In 'Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction,' which is the foundation of ID, steps that prepare the brain to receive information are emphasized, such as gaining the guest's attention (Event 1), stating the objective (Event 2), and stimulating recall of prior knowledge (Event 3).

At the beginning of a tour, please hold off on the standard greetings and itinerary explanations. Instead, try posing one 'small question' that challenges the participants' common sense.

'The ground you are standing on right now was actually at the bottom of a large lake 300 years ago. Let's go find the traces of why the water disappeared.'

With this one sentence, a clear objective (a mini-goal) to 'solve the mystery' is set in the guest's mind. The moment their eyes light up, a simple walking path transforms into a 'field of adventure.'

The guide's role is not to be a commentator who provides the correct answers, but to be a facilitator who supports their discoveries and provides appropriate feedback.

Key points for designing to enhance experiential value

• Task-Centered Structure: Abandon the mere listing of spots and instead adopt a quest format where one question is solved throughout the entire experience.

• Practice of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA): Observe the participants in real-time; if you see signs of boredom (wandering eyes), throw in a slightly more difficult question, and if you see signs of anxiety (stiffness), provide concrete hints.

• Ensuring Reflection: Always set aside the last 10 minutes of the tour to stop all activities and have participants verbalize what changes occurred within them through the experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Local guides want to talk about their own knowledge, and it inevitably becomes a one-sided 'lecture.'
Guides keep talking because they believe that 'explaining a lot equals service to the customer.' To fundamentally change this mindset, you must change the evaluation criteria for guides. Make the success of the tour based not on 'how well they spoke,' but on 'how many times the guest was surprised and how many times they voiced a discovery themselves.' Training is required to help them experience through actual guest reactions (non-verbal data) the fact that satisfaction is much higher when they hold back on explanations and let the guests observe.

Q: How can we transform a region that has given up, saying 'we don't have harsh nature,' into a stage for adventure tourism?
Harsh environments and flashy activities are not the essence of adventure. The everyday life that is taken for granted by locals (for example, tending to fields every morning or cooking traditional preserved foods to survive a harsh winter) is a cross-cultural experience full of surprises for outsiders. Dig deep into the reasons 'why that daily activity took that form' and connect it to the cycles of nature and universal human activities. If you reconstruct how you show things and how you let people experience them, any region can become a magnificent stage for adventure.

Q: How should we respond when participants get tired or lose interest along the way?
That is a signal that the balance between the participant's ability and the challenge has collapsed, and they have exited the flow state. When people are physically tired, they feel strong stress if they are told difficult things. In that case, immediately stop the explanation and prioritize satisfying physiological needs and releasing the senses by saying, 'Let's drink some water, sit on that big rock, and look up at the sky for 5 minutes without doing anything.' Guides are required to have the agility to respond proactively before needs turn into frustration.

Q: Does the value of Japan's niche history and nature resonate with wealthy overseas (inbound) travelers?
Translating Japanese historical and cultural proper nouns directly into English will not resonate with them. What is important is to use analogies that draw upon their existing knowledge and culture. For example, when explaining the Shinto view of nature, express it by comparing it to concepts from movies they are familiar with. Alternatively, keep verbal explanations to a minimum and have them feel it directly through their five senses. By connecting it to their own context, it becomes possible to trigger deep 'self-transformation' that transcends language barriers.

The First Step Starting Tomorrow

There is no need to lament that 'we have nothing here.' In rural Japan, ways of interacting with nature and wisdom for living that have been passed down for generations are quietly breathing.

These hold intense potential, enough to shake a traveler's outlook on life.

What is needed is not a massive investment to build new facilities. It is to reconstruct how existing resources are presented and experienced using a scientific approach.

Stop treating guests as consumers and elevate them to the protagonists of an adventure where they solve mysteries themselves.
Stop having guides talk one-sidedly and commit to being facilitators who ask questions that move the guests' hearts.

There are many things you can do starting today. First, at the beginning of your next tour, instead of the standard greeting, try asking one small question that challenges the participants' common sense.

The moment you see the look in their eyes change, the true adventure that was sleeping in your region should begin.

This time, I talked about the misconceptions regarding the 'combination of three elements' in adventure tourism and the introduction design for promoting self-transformation.

Actually, to sustain the heat of this adventure until the end of the tour and connect it to concrete actions after returning home, deeper 'meaning-making' and the 'use of metaphors' are necessary.

I will share more details about specific methods for building this bridge to daily life on another occasion.

Author Information / Supervisor Profile

Tochigi Outdoor Business Promotion Association BERGTOAD
Love (Kazuyuki Yamazaki)

• WEA (Wilderness Education Association) Internationally Certified Outdoor Leader

• International Environmental Ethics Leave No Trace L2 Instructor

• EFR International Pediatric Emergency Instructor

• Japan Education and Learning Evaluation Organization Certified ID Expert

• Japan Interpretation Association Certified Trainer

• Japan Camping Association D1 Camp Director

• Japan Sports Association Junior Sports Instructor

• Nikko National Park Certified Guide

With over 15 years of experience as an outdoor guide training instructor, I have supervised numerous projects in theory-based human resource development and content creation. I am an expert who combines the 'mechanisms of human psychology and behavioral change' cultivated in the unpredictable field of nature with the scientific approach of Instructional Design (ID) to support sustainable tourism content creation, guide training, and corporate human resource development that applies outdoor guide skills to the business world.

https://bergtoad.net

What is the Tochigi Outdoor Business Promotion Association BERGTOAD?

The training programs provided by us, the 'Tochigi Outdoor Business Promotion Association BERGTOAD,' are distinctly different from general training. Our training methods, designed to reliably elicit 'learning' and 'behavioral change' in participants, have been cultivated based on the necessity for guides entrusted with lives to act reliably in unpredictable natural environments. We fuse this with 'Flow Theory,' which creates human immersion, and 'Instructional Design (ID),' which scientifically constructs learning processes. Rather than simply teaching knowledge, we perform 'experience design' that allows the other party to realize things for themselves and start taking action. This practical training know-how, polished in the world of the outdoors, functions powerfully not only in increasing the added value of regional tourism content but also in various business and educational settings in different forms.