How Mobile-Based Visuals Operate as Messages of Information for Different Cultures? Action case in the pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia

Crowd control is a growing problem in the tourism industry that is flourishing in many western and eastern countries. The “pilgrimage” or “Hajj” to Makkah, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), offers the biggest tourism revenues in the world. Regrettably, thousands of lives have been lost due to extreme cultural and language diversity that result in miscommunication, stampedes, and deaths. The aim of our research is to introduce a methodological approach applying Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a tool to help saving lives and produce Mobile-based Visual Signs (MVS) as artefacts to communicate messages of information for millions of pilgrims coming from thousands of different cultures. To prototype these MVS the “CorelDraw Suite X4” and the “Adobe Photoshop 0.7 ME” have been used interactively with groups of pilgrims, tour guides and officials. Using both of PAR and technology helped engaging pilgrims and locals during the design stage as well as in evaluating MVS as messages for communication in Hajj. In this paper, we show how these MVS reflect different cultural meanings, which we harmonized in a commonly accepted form. As crowd control is an international problem our research developed several techniques within PRA, used prototyping technologies and visual dialogue analysis, giving the opportunity for wider application in similar tourism and pilgrimage places suffering from similar problems.