Free Choice and the “Forced March”

Nina Simon has just posted a thought-provoking piece on her blog about linear storytelling and how it relates to the design and layout of museum exhibitions. She observes that while the digital world theoretically allows for infinite possibilities when it comes to navigation and storytelling, “simplicity trumps possibility” and most digital storytelling still has a linear backbone. She goes on to ask:

“[D]oes this preference for linearity impact people when visiting museums? Are people overwhelmed or confused by the “infinite paths” that we offer through galleries, collections, and exhibitions?”

Simon describes museums like the International Spy Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museums (both in Washington DC) as “fixed march” experiences: visitors are fed into a common entrance and the exhibition galleries follow a fixed linear path, like beads on a string. You always know you’re on the ‘right’ path because there is no real mechanism to stray from it. Simon, like a lot of museum professionals, was sceptical of this approach – aren’t fixed marches dictatorial? Are we sacrificing opportunities for visitors to do their own thing, make their own meanings, because linear exhibitions are easier to operate and manage? But she is now questioning this scepticism – museum professionals likely take this view because they know museums well. The standard experience seems boring and humdrum to them, and they want to explore different ways to subvert it.* But perhaps less frequent visitors like the comfort and grounding of knowing they are on the ‘right’ path?

 

My PhD research to date would suggest that most visitors like to know they are on the ‘right’ path, or at least that they haven’t missed anything. On accompanied museum visits I conducted last year, some of my research participants said things like:

 

“. . . it’s very difficult to choose where you’re going to go from here. You almost need like directions about where you should be starting. . . “

“. . .and it’s a bit of a maze, in a way, in terms of um there’s no obvious, um, path to proceed around, in terms of um you could just follow them around but there’s a lot of branches that you could, navigate . . .”

“Um I find it a little bit tricky because I like to, go through and know that I’ve seen everything, whereas if there’s lots of different pockets that you need to go past, um you lost track of which areas you’ve seen and which you haven’t.”

But it is also true that linearity limits a visitor’s options, particularly if they are more interested in seeing something in particular than checking out the museum in general:

“. it’s less linear in terms of, er, it’s not so, it’s um  .. .it’s it’s less like a sausage machine you’re going in one and coming out the other, you seemed to be able to get more lost and be able to go from one thing to another as we certainly did today.”

“. . .it’s a gallery to me that makes you wind around, which is probably intentional but, sometimes it’s nice to be able to see a big view and work out ‘yes I’m interested in one particular aspect I’m heading over there’, whereas you are forced to wander around, the gallery to find something.”

I visited both of Simon’s cited examples, the Spy Museum and the Holocaust Museum, earlier this year. While I understand what she means about the ‘fixed march’, the experiences did not seem overly restrictive to me. Yes, the galleries were in a fixed linear order, but once you were in a particular gallery it was sufficiently open and spacious that you could choose what you wanted to see or decide what would be a logical path (or how to navigate around the summer crowds). And you were able to tell when you’d seen everything and were ready to move on.

In this sense I think ‘fixed march’ experiences are suitable for museums where a majority of your visitors are likely to be one-off tourists. I could imagine if you were a regular visitor to such museums, the need to trudge through a line of galleries to get to what you really want to look at would be a chore. It brings to mind a trip to Ikea where (except for a handful of easy to miss ‘shortcuts’) you are forced to walk through every section before you get to the checkouts. The rationale for their strategy is clear of course – I have never left Ikea with the ‘just one or two things’ I went there for!

As an alternative to the fixed path I would suggest layouts that incorporate a common ‘home base’ – for instance a central spine off which galleries radiate (like a lot of ‘traditional’ museums) or a hub-and-spoke or cloverleaf arrangement where all galleries open off a central hub or atrium. This is supported by space syntax [1] studies in museum spaces. Space syntax characterises spaces in terms of two main properties: connectivity (a highly connected room has many other rooms opening off of it) and integration (a measure of how directly you can move from any given room to another in a building). A highly connected central hub or spine (or atrium across multiple levels, as below) limits the linear trudge, while at the same time providing a common navigational reference point: all roads lead to Rome, so to speak.

The central atrium, National Museum Scotland
The central atrium, National Museum Scotland

The need for common points of reference in a building has been reinforced to me during some visitor observations I have been doing this week. Most of the exhibition spaces are in a long, thin building that spans four levels, with stairs and lifts at each end. I was tracking visitors in an exhibition space that takes up the entire second floor, where the ‘logical’ route would be to enter via the stairs/lift at either end, and then exit the other. In contrast, I observed several visitors traverse almost the entire length of the gallery, only to double back to enter where they came from. In a couple of instances, visitors did exit from the other end, but shortly thereafter turned around and re-entered the gallery to head back to the exit they came in from. Presumably ending up somewhere different from where they started meant they felt lost, so their solution was to retrace their steps. I would expect that common hubs (where practical) would eliminate this problem.

*Comments on Nina Simon’s blog suggests a cultural dimension to the distaste for linearity. One commenter observed that linear experiences are the norm in Germany, so it is something that German visitors do not question as it has been ever thus. I wonder if the US, as a highly individualistic culture, has more visitors with a yearning to be able to carve out their own path?

[1] Hillier, B., & Tzortzi, K. (2011). Space Syntax: the Language of Museum Space. In S. Macdonald (Ed.), A companion to museum studies (pbk., pp. 282-301). Wiley Blackwell.

3 Replies to “Free Choice and the “Forced March””

  1. Interesting piece. Do you think the ‘Forced March’ is an integral element of the emotional story-telling of the Holocaust museum?

    My feeling is that a linear journey – particularly without shortcuts – would of course be a pain for regular visitors. Yet the advantages in conveying entrapment and claustrophobia (‘why can’t I escape?’ ‘why are we heading relentlessly towards the death of 6 million people?’) must make for an amazing experience for the one time visitor.

    1. I wasn’t thinking about the ‘forced march’ as a metaphor for the Holocaust when I wrote this piece, but now you come to mention it I think this is an experience that benefits from linearity. There is a real sense of foreboding as you first enter the exhibition and go up the lift to get to the first part. This is then defused slightly as you start off with a more ‘intellectual’ exhibition that sets up the political and social context of 1930s Germany. There are a few ‘defusement’ points along the experience as well – at times you cross from one half of the building to another via a glass corridor and you get a bit of daylight and open-ness: I appreciated this break from the darkness (in both senses). I think they also do a good job of letting you choose how much you really want to see – there are pretty awful movies of Nazi experiments, etc that are shown behind mini walls about 1200mm in height. This means that (a) kids don’t see it and (b) you don’t see it unless you choose to look over the wall.

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