TravelTales: Reflecting on Meaningful Travel through Digital Scrapbooking and Journaling

Travel experiences represent enjoyable periods in one's life, but also offer opportunities for thoughtful reflection and personal growth. To facilitate these insights and enhance self-understanding, we developed TravelTales, a smartphone app designed to support storytelling through scrapbooking and reflection through guided journal questions. The development of the app followed a human-centred design approach, starting from design space formulation to initial formative interviews (n = 23) that further explored the concept of meaningful travel. Our initial findings frame travel as a fleeting life experience that challenges one's usual position in space and time, accelerating personal growth. To understand how people narrate their travels to derive such growth, we deployed TravelTales in a probing field study with travellers (n = 8), finding that TravelTales fosters promising outcomes related to personal reflection, remembrance, and self-learning. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work in designing to support reflection and enhance travel experiences.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.