Where signage, notices and timetables exist only in Japanese, a foreign visitor has no way to resolve an in-the-moment problem — and the city has no way of learning that the problem occurred. Visitor difficulties went unrecorded, so Tsukuba had no evidence base for deciding which signs, routes or facilities to fix first.
The reporting channel treats visitors as sensors rather than only as consumers of information. A visitor who runs into difficulty — an unreadable sign, a bus they cannot identify, a facility that turns out to be closed — submits a photograph and a short description from the application. The report is routed to local volunteers, who respond with help or a recommendation.
The exchange serves two purposes at once. The visitor gets a useful answer quickly, which is what makes reporting worth their while; the city gets a geolocated dataset showing where its tourism infrastructure does not meet the needs of non-Japanese speakers. Participatory reporting of this kind is normally built for residents; here it was adapted for short-term visitors who have no ongoing relationship with the city.
– Photograph and free-text problem reports submitted from the visitor’s handset
– Geolocated records tied to where the problem occurred
– Routing of reports to local volunteers for response
– Replies delivered back to the visitor as assistance or a recommendation
– Reports retained as an evidence base for the city’s tourism infrastructure decisions
Trialled in Tsukuba, Japan under the EU–Japan BigClouT project, alongside HukuRepo. The public trial ran from 1 to 30 November 2017 in the Tsukuba Station area and around Mount Tsukuba, in English, with user information anonymised and the collected data used only for the research.
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