Dr Bert Smit
Academic and research departments
Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences, Surrey Hospitality and Tourism Management.About
My research project
Engineering Transformation ExperiencesBert Smit is a Principal Lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences next to pursuing his PhD at Surrey. He specializes in designing and design evaluation of customer experiences with a focus on the development of new methodologies. In his work he combines insights from social science with methodology from design science. His methodologies have been applied and adopted in a wide range of contexts including hotels, zoo’s, tourist destinations, hospitals and offices. Bert publishes in academic journals and professional magazines, but also contributes to text books and speaks at conferences.
Supervisors
Bert Smit is a Principal Lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences next to pursuing his PhD at Surrey. He specializes in designing and design evaluation of customer experiences with a focus on the development of new methodologies. In his work he combines insights from social science with methodology from design science. His methodologies have been applied and adopted in a wide range of contexts including hotels, zoo’s, tourist destinations, hospitals and offices. Bert publishes in academic journals and professional magazines, but also contributes to text books and speaks at conferences.
Publications
Stakeholders must purposely reflect on the suitability of process models for designing tourism experience systems. Specific characteristics of these models relate to developing tourism experience systems as integral parts of wider socio-technical systems. Choices made in crafting such models need to address three reflexivity mechanisms: problem, stakeholder and method definition. We systematically evaluate application of these mechanisms in a living lab experiment, by developing evaluation episodes using the framework for evaluation in design science research. We outline (i) the development of these evaluation episodes and (ii) how executing them influenced the process and outcomes of co-crafting the process model. We highlight both the benefits of and an approach to incorporate reflexivity in developing process models for designing tourism experience systems.