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What kind of visitor are you?

I’ve noticed that some of my most popular blog postings are about visitor statistics – who visits, how often, where they come from, educational levels, how old they are, and so on. We use figures like these as benchmarks: they allow us to see trends at-a-glance, quickly compare and contrast different attraction types and different parts of the country, and give us hard data to report to Government, funders and other stakeholders.

But how much do these numbers really tell us about the nature and quality of the visitor experience, and what visitors are looking for from museums and other free-choice learning settings?

In the book Identity and the Visitor Experience, visitor research expert John Falk seeks to look beyond basic demographic categories to see if there are more meaningful ways to characterise visitors, capture their interests and cater for their needs.

He identifies five main categories of visitor “identities”:

  • Explorers: a large proportion of visitors fit into the ‘explorer’ category. Explorers are motivated my their innate curiosity and desire to find out new things. They are likely to ‘follow their nose’ through an exhibition space, and so appreciate choice and control over their visit. They tend to avoid more structured interpretation such as guided tours and audio guides, as they might be too structured and prevent them from following their interest and curiosity. Explorers are the kind of visitors who call learning “fun” (see my previous post on this topic).
  • Facilitators: these visitors are not there for them; they are there to help their companions learn and have a good time. Parents are facilitators when their main reason for visiting is to take their children to see something. The other main category of facilitators are friends and loved ones who are ‘tagging along’ to a museum that their loved ones really want to see, or perhaps they are showing visiting relatives around. Facilitators experience their visit through the eyes and ears of their companions. Facilitating parents in particular will appreciate information readily to hand that helps them guide and answer the questions of their children. On the other hand, facilitating friends and loved ones will appreciate good amenities and perhaps a decent cafe in which they can await their enraptured companions if they run out of stamina (!)
  • Experience seekers: these are visitors who want to feel like they’ve been there, done that and have seen the highlights. An example of an experience seeker would be the visitors to the Louvre whose main purpose for being there is to see the Mona Lisa, take the archetypal photo of themselves next to it, and file it under their list of life’s ‘must do’ experiences that they have now done. When visiting an attraction, Experience Seekers want to know what the highlights are, and how to find them relatively quickly – they are often on a tight schedule with lots of sights to ‘collect’ over the course of their day out.
  • Professionals / Hobbyists: this is a small but significant group of visitors who have come with a particular purpose in mind. They are also the most critical, in that they include fellow museum professionals, designers, educators and leisure professionals who will evaluate all aspects of the visitor experience according to their field of expertise. This group also includes specialists in the subjects presented in exhibitions; teachers who are the lookout for ideas to take into the classroom; and artists seeking creative inspiration. These visitors have higher than average knowledge and are most likely to take advantage of special events and behind-the-scenes tours which allow them to have a more personalised experience away from the crowds.
  • Rechargers: rechargers make up a relatively small proportion of visitors to most museums, but are more likely to be seen at Art Galleries, Botanical Gardens, Aquaria and Natural Reserves. These are people who have come to simply enjoy the space, taking time out from their day-to-day lives. They are more interested in soaking up the general ambience than engaging with specific content. Rechargers are the most sensitive to crowding, as the noise and hubbub created by other visitors interferes with their opportunity to take ‘time out’.

Unlike our age, socioeconomic backgroud or educational level, identity is not a permanent characteristic of visitors. Someone can be an Experience seeker on holiday, a Facilitator when they take their children to a school holiday program at the local museum, an Explorer when satisfying their own curiosity, and a Recharger when taking a break during their lunch hour at a Botanic Garden.

What was your last visit ‘identity’?

* Source: Falk (2009) Identity and the Visitor Experience. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek CA.

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‘Fun’ and ‘edutainment’

How many times have you seen slogans along the lines of:

We make [insert ostensibly worthy-but-dull topic here] FUN!!!

Science centres and museums are repeat offenders in this regard. And I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with this habit, although I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why. Is it just because it sounds so trite, or is there something deeper at play here?

What is ‘fun’ anyway? Some people think that throwing themselves off a bridge, tethered only by a flexible piece of rope, is the pinnacle of fun and excitement. They part with hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Personally I couldn’t think of anything worse!

When it comes to museum visiting, ‘fun’ is a particularly problematic word. And again, it’s because fun means different things to different people – for some it implies mindless entertainment (and possibly things going ‘bang’); for others it has a more nuanced meaning. To some extent, what people mean by the word ‘fun’ means seems to depend on their age and cultural background.

The lesson here for me is that we have to be careful of the terminology we use (and hear) when speaking to visitors – just because we’re using common language, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all talking about the same thing. It makes it even more important that we let visitors describe and elaborate upon things in their own words as much as possible in our research, and avoid too many pre-defined (and maybe inadvertantly loaded) categories.

Having said that, for some visitors at least, museum visiting is something they definitely would describe as ‘fun’ (as this paper by one of my supervisors, Jan Packer, demonstrates). Drawing from visitors’ descriptions and reflections on their experiences in museums and other free choice learning settings, the paper describes five key aspects of learning for ‘fun’ in museums:

  1. Learning for fun encompasses a mixture of discovery, exploration, mental stimulation and excitement.
  2. The majority of visitors to educational leisure settings consider learning to be, more than anything else, enjoyable.
  3. Although most visitors don’t come with a deliberate intention to learn, they do seek or are unconsciously drawn into an experience that incorporates learning.
  4. Visitors identify four conditions (a sense of discovery or fascination; appeal to multiple senses; a sense that the learning happens ‘effortlessly’; availability of choice in the experience) that together are conducive to the learning for fun experience.
  5. Visitors value learning for fun because it is a potentially transformative experience (i.e. it helps people see the world in new ways and appreciate things differently).

Looking at this paper, I think it starts to nail what my problem with the “making xxx FUN!” schtick is. It betrays a lack of confidence in our material, as well as an underestimation of our audiences. It assumes people will only want to engage with the watered-down and sugared-up version of what we have to offer. Yes we need to find ‘hooks’ with which to engage our audience, but this doesn’t necessarily require ‘dumbing down’ (another horrible term!) or sensationalism.

Which brings me to another rather nasty neologism from the museums and science centres world: ‘edutainment’. Several years ago, it was not uncommon to go to a conference presentation where the words ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ were put at opposite ends of a spectrum.  ‘Education’ was serious, worthy-but-dull stuff; the ‘bitter pill’ which needed sugarcoating by mixing in some whizz-bang, nonchallenging ‘entertainment’. But, as the research shows, Education and Entertainment are not polar opposites!

Entertainment is another word that we need to be careful of, however: it’s not a word that visitors often spontaneously offer up to describe their experience. I’ve read other research (not all of it published) which shows that ‘enjoyment’ is a word that comes up more often.

Either way, when you look at visitor learning in the museum as a function of their stated motivation for visiting, both ‘entertainment’ and ‘education’ motivations are good indicators of learning. That is, those that say they come for enjoyment are just as likely to learn something as those that say they’ve specifically come to learn (e.g.Falk et al, 1998).

So people might come to the museum as some gentle exercise for the mind, considering it an enjoyable way of spending their leisure time, in a similar way that a walk along the waterfront is an enjoyable way to get some exercise for the body. They may not even consider it learning, especially if they define ‘learning’ in terms of being drilled and tested as in formal education. But from a museum’s point of view, learning is exactly what it is.

Yet another reason we need to mind our language.

 

References:

Falk, J., Moussouri, T. and Coulson, D. (1998) The Effect of Visitors’ Agendas on Museum Learning. Curator, vol 41, no 2, 106-120.

Packer, J (2006). Learning for Fun: The Unique Contribution of Educational Leisure Experiences. Curator vol 49 Issue 3, 329-344

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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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Museological Blogging

I’ve had a lot to get my head around lately.

My PhD studies began in earnest at the beginning of this month, and I’ve since become an avid collector of museum and design related literature. That’s the easy part – now to get down to reading, digesting and making sense of it all such that it can help me inform my research question and methodology.

As an area of academic interest, museums sit at the juncture of several fields and schools of thought: pedagogy, sociology, psychology, semiotics, architecture and design research are just some of the areas I’ve had to start to get my teeth into. There is so much out there that sometimes you can find yourself butterflying from one thing to another very quickly: social semiotics in the morning; statistical analysis of visitor data in the afternoon.

But I’m seeing patterns of thinking emerge and I think I’m starting to get a bit of a handle of how all these fields tie together, what ideas have influenced what and where there might be gaps in the existing literature.

Over the next few weeks I will write a few blog posts as bite-size summaries of the main areas of academic enquiry that I’m reading about. I plan to do this for a couple of reasons: firstly, I hope that preparing fairly brief summaries the main areas I’m reading will help me sort out my thoughts as I go. Secondly, it will give me a way of documenting the trajectory of my thinking (knowing full well that it may well make cringeworthy reading 2 – 3 years down the track!).

It also goes without saying that I hope that these posts will be of interest to those of you who are interested in exhibits, design and the visitor experience (and if you’re not, why are you here??), but have neither the time nor the inclination to trawl the literature yourself.

I have created the Museology category for these posts, so they will be easily found (or avoided) depending on your inclination. I hope to post the first one in the next few days.