Choose your own adventure

Once upon a time, some exhibition developers had a problem.

It was the 1980s, and a Natural History museum in the US had two popular and highly advanced aquarium tanks, unique in that they were designed to mimic whole ecosystems. So, to better communicate the scientific and ecological importance of these tanks, the museum decided to redevelop the exhibition area surrounding them*.

But before long, a split emerged in development team. While the scientists, designers, educators and others all agreed on the key concepts and messages that the new exhibition should convey, they could not agree on the best way to communicate it all. There were two competing approaches:

  • Structured: in this layout, visitors would be channelled into a linear route that would systematically introduce visitors to a range of concepts before they reached the tanks.  The rationale of this approach is that it would provide visitors with optimum preparation and background context to fully appreciate the tank displays.
  • Unstructured: this layout would not impose a visit sequence on visitors, but rather allow visitors to engage with exhibits with the order and intensity of their choosing.  Those that advocated this approach held that it would empower visitors to shape their own learning experience in a way that suited them. The agenda would be shaped by the visitor, not the museum.

Such debates are common enough over the course of an exhibition development – I’ve been part of a fair few of my own over the years.  I can imagine the scene of the development meetings, and how passionately (and probably also heatedly!) each side would have argued their case.

So the fact the team couldn’t agree on a fundamental aspect of the exhibition design is nothing out of the ordinary. What is unusual is that this museum had the opportunity to test each option.

The team designed the exhibit elements so that they were modular, moveable units that could be configured in both Stuctured and Unstructured modes. In each case the exhibits were identical; all that would change is the layout. This way each option could be tested and (everyone hoped) this would put the debate to rest once and for all.

Visitors were tracked and timed, with the exhibits they visited and the amount of time they spent on them recorded. In addition, visitors were interviewed at the end of their visit and asked what they thought the exhibition was all about.

The timing studies demonstrated that in both layouts, the time visitors spent in the exhibition space was roughly the same (a median time of only a few minutes). However, visitors to the Unstructured exhibition spent more of their time in the exhibition space actually engaging with exhibits (including reading more text and watching more of the video presentations). Furthermore, they described their experience more positively in post-visit interviews, and demonstrated a better understanding of the exhibition’s intended messages.

So, the Structured mode, which was intended to set things out in a more logical sequence and thus aid understanding, seemed to have the opposite effect. It was the Unstructured mode which did a better job of meeting the experiential and learning needs of visitors. So what was happening?

John Falk, renowned museum learning expert and principal investigator of this study, put forward a couple of possible explanations:

  1. Once visitors have seen the reef tanks, they are more motivated to read the supporting material in order to add additional meaning and context to what they had just viewed. So, in contrast to the curatorial intent, which was for the exhibits to serve as an introduction to the tanks, visitors seemed to prefer to use them the other way around.
  2. Visitors entered the exhibition space with a specific agenda, i.e. to see the tanks. In this circumstance, the linear visit sequence merely served to impede visitors reaching their destination; thus they were less inclined to engage with exhibits which (in their view) were just getting in the way of what they really came to see.  In support of this view, one visitor was quoted to say “I wanted to see the whale and the coral reef, but I had to wind all around and through things in order to see them.”

Broader implications

When we develop exhibitions, we often use words like ‘storyline’ and ‘narrative’ as a way of organising and arranging the ideas of an exhibition in a logical sequence, matrix or hierarchy. Usually, these arrangements manifest themselves in the exhibition space one way or another – for instance the linear arrangement of a timeline, or a ‘hub and spoke’ arrangement of several exhibits which all relate to a unifying central concept.

But exhibitions are not books, and stories are not always linear. Movies such as Memento and Reservoir Dogs have shown that a story can be told outside of the constraints of a traditional linear narrative – in fact, seeing a dramatic outcome and then seeing the sequence of events which led to this climax can be a compelling way to tell a story. Even so, with a movie we are inevitably seeing the story unfold in the order that the makers intended.

A better analogy for an exhibition might be the Choose Your Own Adventure books (that any true child of the 1980s will remember fondly!). In these, the writers set the general scene and context, but the path that each reader takes is one of their own making.

So does this mean that there is no point organising exhibits within an exhibition space? Er, no. There is other research (which I’ll detail in a future post), that shows that thematically linking exhibits both in space and through design attributes can affect visitor experience and understanding in positive ways. The difference here is that the difference between a space that uses design cues to offer guidance to visitors (which they can follow as much or as little as they choose), and a space that insists that visitors engage with it on its own terms.

*This is one of my ‘Museology’ posts, drawing on the published visitor research I’m reading during my PhD studies. In this instance this posting is based on a paper by John Falk: Assessing the Impact of Exhibit Arrangement Visitor Behavior and Learning. Source: Curator Vol 36(2) pp133-146 (1993)

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