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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.

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Don’t box me in!

I’ve been having an interesting debate on Twitter about the usefulness of applying categories or segmentation models to museum visitors. I’ve previously blogged about Falk’s Identity model and Morris Hargreave McIntyre’s Culture Segments, and several museums have their own in-house audience segmentation models that they use to inform exhibition development, programs and marketing.

But some people have a problem with such categorisation: I recall many years ago the first time I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Index in a training workshop – someone in my group found the very idea offensive. So while some people may feel a sense of self-revelation when they discover they are an ENFJ or ISTP, others think it has as much insight as a tabloid horoscope. Their starting premise is that people are each individuals and are not so easily typed and categorised.

Personally, I think visitor typologies are useful, at the very least as heuristics: yes each visitor has their own unique interests and circumstances, but it’s not practical to consider each and every visitor as a unique individual who cannot possibly be grouped in any meaningful way. Conversely, we know the public is not an undifferentiated mass with the same interests, needs and prior knowledge. So segmentation is a middle ground and visitor research tends to bear out the fact that there are patterns in the visiting public, even if the emergent categories are not exactly the same for every museum and at every time.

I wonder if resistance to categorisation arises when such categories are used inappropriately or injudiciously – when they become laws of the land rather than rules of thumb. For instance I’ve taken the MBTI test on more than one occasion and each time I’ve come out with a slightly different result. Therefore it would be wrong to say something like “Person X is an INFP. It necessarily follows that they will do Y in circumstance Z”. Similarly with visitor categories – they are not meant to be dogmatic and they can be fluid: the type of visitor I am today does not necessarily predict the type of visitor I will be tomorrow.

What do you think? When are visitor categories useful and when are they constraining?

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Mind the Gap

Have you ever wondered how it is that so many of your visitors miss a prominent sign or installation – after all it’s in plain sight, right by the entrance? Chances are it’s in the Transition Zone.

Transition Zones were identified by Underhill [1] (see previous post on Underhill here) in his observational studies of retail spaces. When people first enter a store, they can be seen going through a reorientation and refocusing period – adjusting to their new environment, working out where to go next, and so on. In these few metres they are passing through the Transition Zone. In the Transition Zone, people are focused on where they are going, not where they are. Their immediate surroundings are, in effect, invisible to them.

I was reminded of the Transition Zone this week, as I am reading a doctoral thesis by Janine Fenton Sager [2], who applied Underhill’s methods to contemporary art exhibition spaces. Not surprisingly, the same Transition Zone effect applies – both at the entrance to museums as well as to individual exhibition spaces where there is a new environment and/or new topic to adjust to.

The South Australian Museum’s main entrance is a fairly typical example:

The main entrance atrium of the South Australian Museum. Visitors enter this space through a set of automated glass sliding doors, and pass through the second set before entering the entrance lobby proper.

I had discussions with the Museum about the use of this atrium space about a year or so ago, not long after I had read about Underhill’s Transition Zones. While I have not spent a lot of time observing how this particular space is used, the Transition Zone concept would suggest that most visitors have psychologically ‘exited’ the atrium pretty much as soon as they have entered it. They can see the information desk and key decision points in the main lobby beyond (the shop, cafe and galleries all fan off this lobby), and are probably already thinking about where they might go first. Consequently I advised the museum to keep this space minimal, and that any signage in this space would be as good as invisible to most visitors, at least on their way in to the museum. (I notice some brochure racks have crept in since then, and I wonder how well and at what stage of the visit they are used . . . perhaps they are picked up on exiting?)

The large iron meteorite on display in here is an interesting one – it’s an impressive object and possibly sufficiently unusual that visitors may be stopped by it. However it may be more readily noticed on the way out than the way in, and I also wonder what role children play in whether the meteorite is noticed and stopped at. (I suspect children are less susceptible to Transition Zone effects but I’m not sure if this has actually been studied or observed).

These nuances aside, the lesson here is not to position important orientation or introductory signage right by the entrance – it’s too close to the Transition Zone and will end up being missed by the majority of your visitors.

[1] Underhill, P. (1999). Why we buy – the science of shopping. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[2] Sager, J. F. (2008). The Contemporary Visual Art Audience: Space, Time and a Sideways Glance (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis). University of Western Sydney.

 

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Compare and Contrast: Diorama Design

The diorama, typically comprising “preserved organisms and painted or modelled landscapes” (Tunnicliffe and Scheersoi, 2010, p. 187), has been a mainstay of Natural History museums for well over a century. While they are often much maligned as old fashioned by many museum professionals, they continue to be popular with visitors and can be valuable learning tools (Tunnicliffe and Scheersoi, 2010).

My recent visit to the US as well as my own research have got me wondering about the essential ingredients of ‘diorama-ness’. What would a psychological schema of a diorama be from a visitor’s perspective? When does a diorama stop being a diorama?

I would suggest that the displays at the American Museum of Natural History would be the closest to the traditional diorama archetype.

Diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. There is relatively little interpretation beyond the description of the region it depicts.

Traditional dioramas attempt to re-create a naturalistic setting as closely as possible. The back wall of the diorama is often curved to enhance the effect of a foreground and a horizon:

The sand in the foreground and the painted background merge together to create a distant horizon

The dioramas are the principal focus of the exhibition, with the surrounding areas kept in relative darkness:

View into the African Dioramas in the American Museum of Natural HIstory

By contrast, the mammals displays in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History take a different approach. Rather than a sequence of identically sized and evenly spaced dioramas, the space is more open and varied in height and scale:

A general overview of the Mammals area in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

While backdrops are still used to evoke a habitat or setting, there is no attempt to make these look realistic. Rather, the multiple layering of two-dimensional images gave a ‘picturebook’ feel to the displays:

Picturebook dioramas – the animals’ habitat is eluded to rather than directly represented

The Smithsonian displays also sometimes showed multiple levels of the same scene, something I don’t recall seeing in the AMNH dioramas. For instance some dioramas included peepholes to see creatures hiding below ground:

Peep-hole displays showing life above and below ground. The label in the foreground asks “What does this coyote smell?” A beaver hides beneath.

While I’m happy to consider these displays as a version of a diorama, I wonder if other visitors’ interpretation is as flexible. Consider the Biodiversity Gallery at my research site, the South Australian Museum:

A view of the South Australian Biodiversity Gallery. Interpretation is via touchscreen rather than traditional labels.

As with the Smithsonian, these displays are a variation of the diorama archetype. While the displays have quite realistic foregrounds, these are set against a simple blue background:

A desert diorama. The blue is evocative of the clear blue skies of inland Australia, although this link is not made explicit.

Beyond the dioramas, there is further use of design to evoke the habitat – in the forests area, lighting combines with a ceiling feature to create an arboreal feel to the space:

The forests area of the SA Biodiversity Gallery

However, this effect is subtle for those not attuned to seeking out design features. It was not explicitly mentioned by most visitors who I accompanied through this space, suggesting they either didn’t notice it because their attention was absorbed by the displays themselves, or they didn’t think it was worth mentioning. (Some noticed a change in the feel of the space but couldn’t quite put their finger on what was different.)

Design concerns aside, do the displays in the Biodiversity gallery count as dioramas? In the words of one of my research participants:

It’s not even a proper diorama, because the background’s missing. . . . 

Further probing revealed that the painted background on a curved background (creating the artificial horizon) was an essential part of the diorama ‘schema’ for this visitor. However she continued to use the word ‘diorama’ to describe the displays, presumably in the absence of a more appropriate word.

What are the essential ingredients of a diorama to you?

Reference:
Tunnicliffe, S. D., & Scheersoi, A. (2010). Natural History Dioramas: Dusty Relics or Essential Tools for Biology Learning? In Anastasia Filippoupoliti (Ed.), Science Exhibitions: Communication and Evaluation (pp. 186-216). Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc.

 

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Compare and Contrast: Art and Anthropology

Both The Met and the American Museum of Natural History have displays of objects from the Pacific region. What I found interesting were the similarities and differences between the two display approaches – in one museum the objects are presented as works of ‘art’, whereas in the other they are presented as ‘artefacts’ of culture.

An overview of the Oceania gallery in The Met.
The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples in AMNH

The AMNH exhibition looks considerably older than the display at the Met, and the one in the Met is definitely lighter, more airy and spacious – both in respect to the space itself and the density of objects on display. But there are similarities in the colour palette used in both with the dominance of a light, slightly grey blue (ignoring the red-earth inspired colour scheme of the Australian display to the right of the AMNH picture above).

AMNH display cases – a more traditional approach
Displays at the Met – more open and with a greater attention to the aesthetic.

Of the art museums I visited in the United States, The Met was the only one to have dedicated any appreciable space to art from the Pacific region. It turned out there was a reason for this. The Met had acquired the collection of the erstwhile “Museum of Primitive Art” that had been founded by Nelson Rockefeller in association with Rene d’Harnoncourt in 1957. (The museum closed in 1974). These items were part of this so-called “primitive art” collection, along with items from Africa and the Americas. This term betrays a cultural legacy that gave me pause to ponder.

Plaque on display at The Met
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading about Rene d’Harnoncourt’s influence on exhibition design in a recent article[1]. He was director of MoMA from 1949-1967, and in the 1940s was responsible for taking new approaches to display of art, in particular items from the Pacific. He introduced varied colour schemes, theatrical lighting and a decluttered approach to case layouts in a way that both borrowed from and influenced shop window displays. His work was influential in positioning such objects as works of art, rather than just ‘ethnographic curiosities’. He was also interested in creating a market for Pacific art.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of Central Park, the AMNH takes a more anthropological view of its collections. Rather than works of art, the same sorts of objects are shown as representative of a culture. In these displays, the purpose is more to show the ‘archetype’ objects rather than the more pure aesthetic approach of the art museum, even if the objects are pretty similar to untrained eyes such as mine.

AMNH grapples with its own historical legacies in the way that it depicts ‘other’ (i.e., non-Western) cultures. Some of the displays seemed anachronistic in their depictions and terminology. They are presumably products of their time and I can’t imagine displays such as these being conceived today.

A human diorama of ‘pygmies’ in the AMNH

There was something about this that range a vague bell at the time, and later I realised I was recalling Bal’s 1992 critique [2] of the AMNH’s ethnographic displays and the historic cultural assumptions upon which they were based. While that paper is now two decades old, it looks like many of the displays described in that paper haven’t changed radically in the intervening period. It was interesting to re-read the article, now having some knowledge of the spaces it describes.

[1]  Foster, R. J. (2012). Art/Artefact/Commodity: Installation design and the exhibition of Oceanic things at two New York museums in the 1940s. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23(2), 129–157. doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2012.00178.x

[2] Bal, M. (1992). Telling , Showing , Showing Off. Critical Inquiry, 18(3), 556–594.

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Museums as Social Experiences

(N.B. The following is a section rescued from the cutting room floor of my literature review – I thought I might as well put it to some use . . . )

The Social Visitor Experience

Museum visiting is fundamentally social activity – the co-presence of others is an integral part of the experience, even among visitors in different social groups. As we experience museums, we see and are seen by others, creating a sense of mutual or ‘public visibility’ (Choi, 1999; Jansen, 2008; Macdonald, 2007; Zamani & Peponis, 2010).

The social aspect of museum visiting is a principal motivator for a significant subset of visitors (Falk, Moussouri, & Coulson, 1998; Packer & Ballantyne, 2002), and can be considered a “fundamental source of satisfaction in museum visiting” (McManus, 1988, p. 43). There also appears to be qualitative differences in the learning experiences of social groups as compared to those of lone visitors (Packer & Ballantyne, 2005).

The social context can have an impact on the strategies used for moving through exhibition areas. Social visiting groups such as couples and families periodically separate and reform, guiding one another to areas of interest. In this way visitors participate in a collaborative learning experience (Phipps, 2010). In the case of family groups, McManus likened the family to “a collective hunter-gatherer team actively foraging in the museum . . . their behaviour is practical and economical since the exploration and information-gathering is shared out between family members” (McManus, 1994, p. 91).

Through observations of visitors to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a site of “labyrinthine layout and bewildering exhibits”, Jansen (2008)  identified five navigational techniques used by groups: tour guiding (where one member of the party takes the role of leading others), conjoining experiences (using physical intimacy to merge perspectives while using exhibits, in particular by couples); leapfrogging (where visitors stay within general proximity but are viewing exhibits separately, occasionally interacting in brief exchanges); scouting (where one visitor strikes ahead to preview upcoming exhibits before returning and reporting to the main group) and flagging (where visitors move in a seemingly uncoordinated way, but will highlight exhibits of particular interest to other members of their party to ensure they do not miss them).

In light of the importance of the social dimension, some researchers have criticised the tendency of curators, designers and researchers to conceive exhibits and the visitor-exhibit relationship in terms of an idealised individual visitor, rather than studying the social dynamics of multiple visitors interacting with exhibits together and influencing each other’s experiences (Heath & vom Lehn, 2004; Macdonald, 2007). Studying social interactions beyond overtly observable behaviours is inherently complex, as a full understanding requires analysis of both behaviour and conversations (and other social interactions) between visitors. It requires detailed and rich data, and thus necessitates the use of either audio or video recording of visitor behaviour (Allen, 2002; Heath & vom Lehn, 2004, 2008; Sanford, 2010). Given the ethical, logistical and practical complexities that the use of recording equipment presents, there are relatively few studies which have used recording data (Allen, 2002; Yalowitz & Bronnenkant, 2009).

However, the use of recording equipment allows the study of the complexity of behaviour and social interactions, the nuances of which are difficult to document by other means. For instance, in a landmark study, McManus used audio recordings taken at exhibits in the British Museum (Natural History) to demonstrate that visitors read exhibit labels to a greater extent than is evident from direct observation – manifesting itself in a phenomenon known as text echo (McManus, 1989).  In a more recent study, the conversations of visitor pairs were studied as they moved through an exhibition at the Exploratorium, using audio recording supported by visitor tracking. The results revealed that learning-related talk took place at 83% of the exhibit elements at which either person stopped. Coding of the conversations into five different categories: perceptual, affective, conceptual, connecting and strategic, revealed that the most common categories of learning talk were perceptual, affective and conceptual (Allen, 2002).

Video recording has also been used to record the visitor-visitor and visitor-exhibit interactions at exhibits incorporating multimedia as well as traditional object displays (Heath & vom Lehn, 2004, 2008). These studies have demonstrated how visitors play an important role in directing and mediating each other’s exhibit experience. However, given the inherent limitations in video data collection in a museum setting (described in Yalowitz & Bronnenkant, 2009), these studies document only small and fleeting aspects of the visitor experience, for instance what happens at a single exhibit interface.

References:

Allen, S. (2002). Looking for learning in visitor talk. In G. Leinhardt, K. Crowley, & K. Knutson (Eds.), Learning Conversations in Museums (pp. 259-303). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Choi, Y. (1999). The morphology of exploration and encounter in museum layouts. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 26, 241-250.

Falk, J. H., Moussouri, T., & Coulson, D. (1998). The Effect of Visitors’ Agendas on Museum Learning. Curator: The Museum Journal, 41(2), 106-120.

Heath, C., & vom Lehn, D. (2004). Configuring Reception: (Dis-)Regarding the “Spectator” in Museums and Galleries. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(6), 43-65. doi:10.1177/0263276404047415

Heath, C., & vom Lehn, D. (2008). Configuring “Interactivity”: Enhancing Engagement in Science Centres and Museums. Social Studies of Science, 38(1), 63-91. doi:10.1177/0306312707084152

Jansen, R. S. (2008). Jurassic technology? Sustaining presumptions of intersubjectivity in a disruptive environment. Theory and Society, 37(2), 127-159. doi:10.1007/s11186-007-9054-9

Macdonald, S. (2007). Interconnecting: museum visiting and exhibition design. CoDesign, 3(1), 149-162. doi:10.1080/15710880701311502

McManus, P. (1988). Good companions: More on the social determination of learning-related behaviour in a science museum. Museum Management and Curatorship, 7(1), 37-44. doi:10.1080/09647778809515102

McManus, P. (1989). Oh, yes they do: How museum visitors read labels and interact with exhibit texts. Curator: The Museum Journal, 32(3), 174-189.

McManus, P. (1994). Families in museums. In R. Miles & L. Zavala (Eds.), Towards the Museum of the Future: New European Perspectives. London.

Packer, J., & Ballantyne, R. (2002). Motivational Factors and the Visitor Experience: A Comparison of Three Sites. Curator: The Museum Journal, 45(3), 183-198.

Packer, J., & Ballantyne, R. (2005). Solitary vs. Shared: Exploring the Social Dimension of Museum Learning. Curator: The Museum Journal, 48(2), 177-192. doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.2005.tb00165.x

Phipps, M. (2010). Research Trends and Findings From a Decade (1997-2007) of Research on Informal Science Education and Free-Choice Science Learning. Visitor Studies, 13(1), 3-22. doi:10.1080/10645571003618717

Sanford, C. (2010). Evaluating Family Interactions to Inform Exhibit Design: Comparing Three Different Learning Behaviors in a Museum Setting. Visitor Studies, 13(1), 67-89. doi:10.1080/10645571003618782

Yalowitz, S., & Bronnenkant, K. (2009). Timing and Tracking: Unlocking Visitor Behavior. Visitor Studies, 12(1), 47-64. doi:10.1080/10645570902769134

Zamani, P., & Peponis, J. (2010). Co-visibility and pedagogy: innovation and challenge at the High Museum of Art. The Journal of Architecture, 15(6), 853-879. doi:10.1080/13602365.2011.533550

 

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What kind of *non* visitor are you?

In comparison to studies of museum visitors, studies of NON-visitors are much rarer. But, just as we do not consider museum visitors as an amorphous population, it would be wrong to lump all non-visitors into a single group. The reasons people choose not to visit are just as varied and interesting as the reasons behind why people do visit.

The seminal paper in non-visitor studies is “Staying away: why people choose not to visit museums” published in Museum News in 1983 by Marilyn Hood. In a Google search for a link to this paper, I didn’t find it (I’m not sure if it’s available online) but I did find this very helpful summary of non-visitor research (limited as the field is in relation to visitor research).

Hood’s work found that visitors and non-visitors varied in what kinds of experiences they valued in their leisure time, and the extent to which museums offered (or were perceived to offer) these experiences.

I have recently read a paper that offers an interesting complement to Falk’s ‘Identity’ model of Museum Visitors (as described here)  by incorporating categories of non visitors: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert’s “Museum Perceptual Filters” or MPFs*. Stylianou-Lambert describes the MPFs as ‘spectacles of perception’ that frame the way people think about (art) museums. There are 8 MPFs, five of them relating to visitors and three to non-visitors.  The MPF model emerged independently of Falk’s work, although the author acknowledges the parallels. I’ve related the five visitor MPFs to the nearest Identity in Falk’s model (any error in their allocation is mine):

  1. Professional – artists or museum professionals who visit the art museum to inform or inspire their work (Falk’s Professional / Hobbyists)
  2. Art-Loving – these visitors valued the aesthetic emotional connection to art rather than increasing their knowledge about it. These are the sort of visitors who stop only at a piece of art that ‘speaks’ to them in some way. (Falk’s Rechargers)
  3. Self-exploration – people who come to expand their horizons and learn new things; following a personal and introspective quest (Falk’s Explorers)
  4. Cultural Tourism – people who visit art museums mostly on holiday, as part of taking in the cultural offerings of a destination (Falk’s Experience Seekers)
  5. Social visitation – visitors who come to the art museum primarily in a social context, particularly in the company of art-loving relatives (Falk’s Facilitators)

Stylianou-Lambert extends the Falk model by characterising three main MPFs of non-visitors:

  1. Romantic – people who have a positive view of museums, but for some reason decide that the museum is not for them. This MPF includes people who might feel intimidated by the museum or their lack of knowledge about art.
  2. Rejection – people who view the museum in a negative light, as places that are pretentious or snobbish and full of incomprehensible things. By contrast to the Romantics, who placed themselves as being somehow inferior to the museum, Rejecters appeared more self-confident in their dismissive attitude to museum’s importance.
  3. Indifference – people who felt that art museums had no personal connection or relevance to their lives. This category is probably the one most closely mirrored in Hood’s work about the disconnect between the leisure expectations of visitors versus non-visitors.
Postscript: after I drafted this post I came across an interesting debate about Falk’s Idenity model in the latest edition of Visitor Studies. Abstracts are free online, and while the full articles are behind a paywall they are well worth a read if you have access.

*Reference: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (2009): Perceiving the art museum, Museum Management and Curatorship, 24:2, 139-158  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09647770902731783

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Which hat fits?

People who know me will be aware that I wear a lot of hats (and this has nothing to do with my bio picture!).

 

Taking just my Australian memberships, I’m a member of Interpretation Australia, Museums Australia and Australian Science Communicators. In the past I have also been an active member of the British Interactive Group and Visitor Studies Group; and a regular presence at European Science Centres conferences.

While I like this variety and the diversity of people this allows me to meet – I sometimes feel that none of my many hats is a true fit. I always feel a bit of an outsider. To illustrate my point I’ll need to bring in some stereotypes (or are they archetypes?); in any case bear with me:

  • I’m not a real Science Communicator because science communicators are people who spend their entire working days evangelising about the importance and benefits of science to our lives.
  • I’m not a real Museum Professional because I don’t have a specific subject or collection about which I’m particularly knowledgeable; furthermore I’ve never actually worked in an operating museum.
  • I’m not a real Interpreter because interpreters are outdoorsy types who love spending all their time in national parks and getting people excited about the value of nature.
My roots (and qualifications) are in Science Communication, but the closest fit these days is probably Visitor Studies, which spans my interests across all these fields. However, the small and distributed nature of Australia’s population makes it difficult for a dedicated Australian Visitor Studies community to be vibrant and self-sustaining (for instance, the Evaluation and Visitor Research Special Interest Group of Museums Australia is small and has limited resources). I’ve recently joined the Visitor Studies Association in the US and I hope to be able to afford to travel to their conference in next year. But it’s no substitute for the face-to-face collegial and social networks you can foster much closer to your own backyard.
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That said, I think I can turn my ‘outsider’ status into an advantage. Perhaps I can build bridges and offer broader insights that can inform each of the respective fields?
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As I noted before, at the joint Museums Australia / Interpretation Australia conference held earlier this month I noticed some instances where the different histories and assumptions of the respective fields came together on a bit of a collision course. I’ve been thinking about why that is, and have come up with a few ideas. I’d be interested in hearing what you think:
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Collections value is axiomatic; environmental value isn’t (yet)
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For museums, the starting point is collections: unlike visitor centres, or other exhibition sites, museums have collections which they are duty-bound to study and preserve for the benefit of future generations. Because this is so wrapped up in a museum’s identity, no-one expects museums to have to justify it. There is no apparent need to explain to the public why looking after a bunch of Picassos or ancient artefacts is important. It’s just generally accepted that it’s something that advanced civilisations should do.
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Unfortunately, the same cannot always be said for our natural heritage. Those same civilisations that have treasured their Picassos and potsherds have often given their environmental assets short shrift. National Parks have a shorter history than museums, and their intrinsic value is questioned more frequently (this might also be because National Parks are more likely to be in direct conflict with economic interests such as mining and logging).
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Whatever the reason, it means that Museums and Interpreters (of natural heritage) probably assume a different starting point when it comes to communicating with their audiences – for museums, the collection is axiomatic; for natural heritage the battle for full recognition is still being won (or is perceived to be so).
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Interpretation is all ‘Front of House’

By definition, Interpretation is about communicating with the public (especially visitors). Thus interpretation will attract people who are visitor-focused and genuinely interested in how visitors think, act and react. Museums, on the other hand, have many staff whose roles do not bring them into direct contact with the visiting public. They may not even be particularly interested in that aspect of the museum’s operations. At a museums conference, there will always be a mix of ‘back of house’ and ‘front of house’ interests. This is less so in the interpretation world, and I wonder if this difference was why some of my interpretation colleagues expressed frustration at some museum professionals not ‘getting it’ when it came to interpretive concepts such as themes and narrative.

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Parallel Literary Canons
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You will see I’ve made the generalisation that Museums tend to be more about Collections and Interpretation is more about National Parks. The lines are blurred for sure, but this distinction is rooted in history.
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Freeman Tilden, the ‘father of interpretation’, was from the National Park Service – not a museum. Thus the origins of interpretation being an outdoorsy, Parks-led discipline can be traced to Tilden and his interests. Similarly, Sam Ham, who is among the most cited contemporary writers on interpretation, has a background in forestry management. It would be impossible to do a course in Interpretation without encountering the work of Tilden and Ham. However their names rarely (if ever?) appear in the museum studies literature.
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By contrast, comparable literature in museum education / visitor studies is more explicitly grounded in the theories of pedagogy and psychology. Most of the authors in this field are from this more academic background, and have sought to apply a more theoretical approach to understanding the museum space. The roots of museum visitor studies is traced to psychologists (Robinson and Melton) who tracked visitor movements through art galleries in the 1920s and 1930s. The landmark literature, mostly from the 1990s, was by museologists (Eilean Hooper Greenhill), educators (George Hein and John Falk & Lynn Dierking) and psychologists (Stephen Bitgood). While this work is not incompatible with the Interpretation literature, there are different starting points and assumptions, and I’m not sure how well-known their work would be to most Park-based interpreters (with the exception of Falk & Dierking, whose work is probably the closest to bridging the nature-culture divide in the literature). A special hat tip to my PhD supervisors here too, Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne, whose work spans museums and natural heritage settings – no surprises why I was attracted to their work!
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The different scholarly traditions may be the origins of another divide I perceived in the conference – between the academically-minded and the more practically-driven. Again, I think I’m a bit of both – I like academic theories and research, but I want to keep sight of how these findings can inform real-life practice.
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Authority and Authorship

In my last post, I was musing about whether exhibitions can sometimes leave things too open to interpretation, in the process ending up just being confusing and coming across as elitist.

In the context of this, a recent article by Pete Brown in Museum Management and Curatorship* is very illuminating. His research:

“. .  . aimed to test whether [using exhibitions to provoke debate] is just an academic, post-modern indulgence that bewilders and alienates visitors, or whether it has real value for audiences.”

The article, “Us and them”, is a case study of Manchester Museum’s 2008 exhibition of the Lindow Man (a 2000 year old bog body discovered in the 1980s). The 2008 exhibition wasn’t the first time that Lindow Man had been displayed at Manchester Museum. However previous exhibitions had presented Lindow Man as an “archaeological treasure” (the ‘traditional’ interpretation) but did not explore the ethical issues surrounding the collection and display of human remains (issues which have come to the fore in more recent years). In constrast, the new exhibition sought to emphasise Lindow Man’s humanity, and speculate on his life and death rather than just treat him as purely an archaeological find:

“The key goal of the exhibition was to contextualise Lindow Man in a way that encouraged respectful reflection, inviting visitors to question the interpretation of archaeological evidence and the practice of displaying human remains in museums. The ‘post-modern’ concept sought to expose the process of development and construction, and to present various interpretations of what little evidence exists.”

Produced following extensive consultation with groups having a scientific, geographical or spiritual connection to Lindow Man, the exhibition was “poly vocal”, representing a range of viewpoints.

The exhibition design was intended to mirror the fact that that the story of the Lindow Man is incomplete and open to debate, by using finishes and materials which were deliberately left rough and unfinished.

This ‘polyvocal’ approach prompted considerable debate amongst the museum professionals involved: Was the museum abdicating its responsibility to educate the public or was it actually being more inclusive?

(This touches on similar issues to what happened when the Science Museum covered alternative medicine in one of its exhibitions – to the anger of those who expect the Museum to present only scientific authority).

The paper presents a good description of the issues museums face with respect to authority, the ownership of the ‘truth’, and the myth of ‘value-neutral’ displays. Exhibitions are products of their time and inevitably bear the fingerprints of the values and prejudices of the culture that produced them. But in this paper Brown goes a step further. Rather than just theorising about how visitors might respond to the museological shift in self awareness and self image, he presents some visitor research (something which is often sadly lacking in such debates).

Brown interviewed around 100 visitors, using a combination of Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) and post-visit Questionnaire. Personal Meaning Mapping is an open-ended mind-mapping exercise conducted before and after an exhibition visit. It is a way of comparing visitors’ knowledge, attitudes and thoughts about an exhibition’s key idea and to see how these are affected by the exhibition experience. The questionnare collected demographic information as well as asking about visitors’ motivations for visiting the exhibition and general museum-going habits.

In the post-visit PMM exercise, nearly three quarters of visitors mentioned something to do with the exhibition’s ‘design, construction and atmosphere’. Apparently most of these comments were unfavourable – visitors missed the interpretive point of the deliberately ‘unfinished’ design and instead just saw it as tacky, incompetent and unprofessional. (Design like this presumably flies in the face of social conventions where ‘professional’ is used synonymously with ‘polished’).

But besides this observation, the PMM showed that nearly all visitors gained new knowledge, despite the non-didactic approach of the exhibition. In addition, more than half of visitors demonstrated attitudinal shifts, exploring and questioning their own assumptions about the issues raised. Going even further, many of these visitors had been inspired to delve further and find out more. However, others were clearly incensed by the approach taken and frustrated by the lack of an authoritative voice:

‘ . . . the exhibition, depending on an individual’s perspective, was seen as groundbreaking, experimental and challenging, or shoddy, lazy and unprofessional.’

Clearly, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Brown then goes on to say “With hindsight, I think the Museum could have made the thinking behind its approach more overt. . . ”

This is the point I was getting to (admittedly a bit awkwardly) in my last post. We shouldn’t be afraid of being experimental in our approach to exhibitions, and we do need to test boundaries from time to time. But we need to also ensure we aren’t leaving our audiences behind in the process.

Alienated visitors just switch off – at which point it doesn’t matter what we say.

*Source:  Brown, Pete (2011). Us and Them: who benefits from experimental exhibition making? Museum Management and Curatorship Volume 26, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 129 – 148

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The Narrative Dilemma

In my last blog post, I talked about the beauty of simplicity in storytelling – being selective in what you say so that it comes through clearly and compellingly. This approach has its critics though, who argue that we are defined as much by what we don’t say as by what we do.

Postmodern critiques of museums have pointed out the shared history that museums have with the colonialism and imperialism of (particularly) the 18th and 19th centuries. Museums were repositories of colonial bounty, sometimes sourced via practices that would be considered highly unethical by today’s standards. Objects were classified and ordered according to systems that  mirrored the prevailing natural, social and cultural hierarchy. ‘Naturally’, the  white western European gentleman occupied the top tier as the pinnacle of civilisation and scholarly knowledge.

Knowingly or otherwise, museum curators reinforced this sociocultural worldview. Museums placed ‘primitive’ Indigenous cultural artefacts alongside Natural History collections – thus positioning them as part of ‘nature’ and not ‘culture’ (and definitely not civilisation!). There was no space for other interpretations of the objects and their meanings besides that of Western scholarship – in the parlance of Postmodernism any alternative interpretations or voices were ‘silenced’.

19th century museum interior (Source http://www.flickr.com/photos/museemccordmuseum/2865472738/)

Museums of the time may have ostensibly had public education as part of their mission, but there was little concession made for the prior knowledge or interest of the visitor. The visitor had no choice but to engage with the displays on the curator’s terms, and if the minimal interpretation provided was insufficient for understanding it was a deficiency in the visitor not the curator. Commentators of the time lamented that increased public access was bringing the ‘wrong sort’ of visitor to the museum, who failed to appreciate the collections in a way that they deemed appropriate.

Constructivism emerged in the second half of the 20th century as part of a backlash against this ‘master narrative’ worldview, as the social and political role of the museum changed. This was done in a broader academic context where implicit power relationships in society were being deconstructed and questioned.

Consequently, the desire to allow for multiple interpretations has made the idea of a strong narrative or storyline an anathema for some. A storyline is considered an imposition, potentially ‘silencing’ other perspectives or interpretations that the visitor may make if allowed to engage with the objects more freely.

However, this brings us to a conundrum – exhibitions developed along postmodern or constructivist principles can be just as baffling to visitors as the minimally-interpreted elitist institutions of times past.

The freedom to have multiple points of entry and thus interpretation can just as easily manifest itself as a space which is confusing and disorientating. Juxtapositions of objects with no overlying message or storyline can be interpreted by visitors unversed in the constructivist viewpoint as being  ‘a mess’ or ‘all over the place’. Rather than liberated from an imposed institutional storyline, visitors can end up feeling confused and demoralised. A lack of storyline may even be interpreted as a lack of intellectual courage on the part of curators – an accusation levelled at museums by Amanda Lohrey and the subject of my first blog post nearly a year ago.

Postmodernists may argue that visitors need to be ‘educated’ into new interpretations and to be present with their discomfort at the lack of narrative, in order to give new meanings and interpretations space. But this point of view seems to be just another version of ‘the visitor is at fault’ arrogance of the Victorian-era curators.

I am not opposed to multiple interpretations and leaving things open to visitors making their own meanings. But sometimes (and apologies if this is  a bit ironic), the fact that this is the intent needs to be made clear somehow. Otherwise, if taken to extremes, the constructivist approach may well end up substituting one type of elitism for another.