Leave Your Phone At Home

overtourism

(noun) [over•tour•ism] 

The impact of tourism on a destination, or parts thereof, that excessively influences perceived quality of life of citizens and/or quality of visitors’ experiences in a negative way.
UN World Tourism Organization

I created „Leave Your Phone At Home“ as my major project during my BA. With this project, I wanted to raise awareness for the impact influencers and Instagram have on travel destinations and the consequences of overtourism.
For this issue, I decided to create a book and an online campaign including a website and Instagram.

Target Group

The target audience consists of women between 18 and 30. I chose this target group because women are often the ones that get affected by social media easier and also spent more time on it. The women can be in different love situations, single, in a relationship or married, do not have any children yet, but might be in the position to plan on becoming mothers soon. They have had higher education and are therefore more likely to rethink behaviour patterns. They earn enough money to be able to afford more vacations each year, not the most luxurious holidays. Still, they rather want to go on more adventures than spending all their money on one expansive vacation. 

Furthermore, they are at an age where you start to rethink your behaviour. While it seems reasonable to just post about everything while you are still a teenager, people around their 20s think about what really should be shown publicly and how important it is to oneself to let everyone know how great your life is going. They are most likely to have had social media accounts for several years now because the different platforms grew more prominent when they were in their teenage years. Therefore they have seen the changed that took place in the last years. In addition to that, they are easily influenced by different celebrities and influencers on Instagram and have been following product recommendations often.

Book

The book forms my main piece of this project. It informs the reader about the complete situation, how we get influenced and what we can change. To make it fitting to the topic, I wanted to create a book that seems like a coffee table book from the outside, as this is something people like to buy just for their Instagram. However, on the inside, it turns out to get darker the further it is read. With that, I want to make sure people understand the complete issue.

Website

 On the website, I want to share similar content as within the book. Furthermore, the users get the chance to inform themselves about different travel destinations that are facing overtourism and where they could go instead. Here I also want to collect more “stories behind the picture“, whenever I come across new ones.

Instagram

The Instagram account (@leave.your.phone.at.home) represents the complete content of my book. To make it more interesting and outstanding from other accounts I decided to use a design that is layouted over the complete feed and highlight stories, where longer stories can be read.

This project was created in June 2020.