Things have been quiet here for a few weeks as all my writing energies have gone into producing a chunk of my literature review for my PhD. The good news is that my supervisors think it’s a good start!
So out of all the research and musings I’ve read so far, what’s coming out as the main themes worth exploring in my own research? What’s struck me so far is the importance of understanding the museum experience from a psychological perspective, in particular the emotional or affective dimension. In other words, it’s not just what museums have to show or to tell, it’s how they make us feel.
People visit museums for all sorts of reasons. Other people don’t visit for all sorts of other reasons. Peel back some of these reasons and you find it’s more about how the museum communicates with us on an emotional level: do we find it relaxing or exhausting? Exhilirating or baffling? Friendly or exclusive? Exploratory or didactic?
Following from this, my interest is how the design of museums (architecturally as well as within different exhibitions) sets up some of these emotional responses, and thus creating an internal mindset well before we’ve had a chance to figure out what the museum is all about on a cognitive, content-centred level.
This perspective creates interesting new territory for visitor research, and an area where we can challenge accusations of ‘dumbing down’ in response to focus groups and front end evaluation, for instance the recent “nastygram” the NY Times gave the Brooklyn Museum.
That post (from the Asking Audiences blog) neatly summarises how focusing on the purely fact-based aspects of an exhibition can have us miss the point:
. . . we’re starting with a narrowly cognitive, educative purpose in mind. We’re interested in what visitors know about [a subject] rather than (for example) what they feel, what they wish, what they fear, what they find beautiful, what they find sad. We’re looking at a single, isolated aspect of human connection to the material. It’s not necessarily the most interesting aspect, but it’s the one that museums, as Enlightenment institutions, have traditionally cared about most.
Based on what I’ve seen in the most recent museum research, the shift from testing facts to exploring feelings already underway. And it’s an area I hope to contribute to.