Co-Creation and Urban Exploration: A Log-Based Comparison of Two In-the-Wild Deployments

This study presents a descriptive, log-based comparison of two real-world deployments of a location-based storytelling walking application, “TokoTokoBanashi,” conducted at the Juso Art Festival in Osaka in 2024 and 2025. The application supports urban exploration by allowing users to visit “story spots” shown on a map and unlock self-contained stories by taking photographs on-site, without a predefined route. The two deployments differed in several design and opera- tional conditions, including content authorship (2024: developer-curated; 2025: resident co-created), as well as interface and implementation details. Rather than isolating causal effects, this study adopts an exploratory descriptive case comparison of two operational settings. Using location and interaction logs, we analyze visitors’ behavior in terms of spot selection, staying near spots, and overall movement scale. We introduce indicators to characterize these aspects and report how behavioral tendencies differed between the two deployments. The results illustrate how design conditions, including the introduction of co-creation practices, can be reflected in different combinations of visiting, staying, and moving patterns in real-world usage.