Category: Research

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How to get an emotional response from museum goers

Rebecca Carlsson
Original paper on Museum Next

Toolkit for Emotion in Museums

If art and culture is all about connecting with an audience, then what can museums do to cement this relationship? Is it a case of simply displaying exhibits of interest or is there more to it?

Nobody can deny that museums provide us with a rich seam of educational content. Museums provide the opportunity to enhance knowledge on a variety of subjects using a wide range of historical, contemporary and even future-thinking sources.
The real challenge of a museum exhibition is to evoke an emotional as well as an intellectual response. By tapping into a visitor’s heart as well as their head, curators and interpretive planners can expect their efforts to stay with people for longer, enhance their experience and encourage museum-goers to make a recommendation to their friends and family.
But the relationship between museums and emotion can be a tricky one to balance. We’re going to take a closer look at how museums can and do affect their visitors on a deeper level.

Creating an environment that encourages emotion

As the Museum of Feelings demonstrates, the way that an exhibit plays on one’s senses has a crucial role in generating emotion. Light, sound, smells, textures and even tastes can all enhance the bond between installation and visitor. Everything down to the size of the room and acoustics in a space can have a dramatic effect on the experience – helping to make an exhibit feel more grand and imposing or calm and intimate.
This is a challenge and responsibility that faces interpretive planners each time they begin to map out the look and feel of an installation. As is stated in the white paper, Developing a Toolkit for Emotion in Museums.
“Humans are emotional animals. Whether exhibition developers plan for emotion or not, every visitor brings their feeling self to the museum; it cannot be separated from the thinking self. Indeed, social science research suggests we wouldn’t even want to try, that emotions actually help us learn more effectively.”
One approach to the conceptual design phase of a new exhibition is to generate an emotional map, documenting how visitors will move through an installation or collection in time. Of course, consideration also needs to be given to how varying visitor numbers might impact on the overall experience. After all, a quiet day at a museum provides plenty of time for quiet contemplation whereas a crowded gallery full of jostling tourists will undoubtedly change the dynamic. For this reason, managing space, positioning, visitor flow and many other environmental factors is part and parcel of this particular challenge.

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5 Strategies you need to know to keep your exhibit on budget

David Whitemyer (Luci Creative)
Original paper on Museum Next

Museum exhibits can be pricey. Whether it’s a permanent installation or a travelling exhibition, myriad influences can affect the cost. Image acquisition, AV hardware, shipping, materials, and more, can quickly throw a conservative project budget way off track, unless these aspects are carefully considered during the design process. 
Current estimates for the cost of museum exhibits are around $75 to more than $800 per square foot. This ridiculously wide range is due to a number of factors that differ from project to project, but which clearly make exhibit budget planning difficult, uncertain, and frightening. Whether your institution is flush with cash or on a shoestring budget, here are five proven methods for keeping your exhibition project costs in check:

  1. Have a Contingency
  2. Reduce the Scope of Work
  3. Involve Fabricators Early
  4. Communicate Honestly
  5. Avoid the Bandwagon

Have a Contingency
A contingency is money set aside, to be used for increases in market costs or unforeseen items and services. For an exhibit project, it’s wise to have both a design contingency and a fabrication contingency. The design contingency can help fund great ideas that are born during the creative process, which might be financially more ambitious than the original program. A fabrication contingency will cover unpredictable costs related to things like travel, shipping and materials.

Reduce the Scope of Work
As the saying goes, “You can have anything, but you can’t have everything.” One of the fastest ways to get your exhibit costs in-line with your budget is to trim some of the fat. This could include implementing strategies such as reducing the project’s square footage or decreasing the number of trips or meetings.

Involve Fabricators Early
Whether you’ve hired a design-build firm or a sole exhibit design specialist, it helps to bring in a fabricator during the creative process. An exhibit fabricator can assess the physical design – from as early as the concept phase – to provide accurate cost estimates, material and finish suggestions, and coordinate ongoing museum architecture or general contracting work.

Communicate Honestly
This is a two-way street. Exhibit designers owe it to their museum clients to be frank if the project expectations and brainstorming ideas outweigh the project budget. Likewise, if during the creative process a designer is recommending solutions or technologies beyond your comfortable reach.  If this happens then you need to speakup, put on the brakes, and reevaluate what your budget can afford.

Avoid the Bandwagon
It’s easy to get caught up in high-tech trends, and to assume that your visitors expect theatrical immersion, multi user interactive tables, mobile apps, and AR or VR experiences. Although these things can enhance a museum exhibition and provide unique content delivery, they may not be realistic within a conservative project budget. Consider these costs at the beginning of the project and involve a media developer in the conversation so that s/he can share ideas and provide alternatives that fit within your budget.
It’s likely that following just one of these five strategies will help to keep your exhibit project on budget, but you may need to meld a few of them. Working with your partners, the project budget should be discussed and re-assessed from day one – from the kickoff meeting through to the project’s grand opening. Everyone must be aware of the budget, so that the entire team can be responsible for keeping it in check.

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10 Museum Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Devon Turner
Original paper on Museum Next >

River & Rowing Museum What’s On Guide designed by Altogether Creative.

We’re aiming to cleanse the internet of cringe-worthy content. Help us spread the word about museum marketing mistakes to avoid so we can forever eliminate cut-off content and hours spent on admin.
Marketing is about appealing to the masses. From inaccessible web practice, to trashing good content, read all about what you shouldn’t do, to learn about what you should.

  1. Speaking to one audience
  2. Missing out on a blog (example with the Australian National Maritim Museum)
  3. One-use content
  4. Being hard to reach
  5. Not sizing graphics
  6. Not joining in festivals and events
  7. Not using a Social Media Management Tool
  8. Forgetting about print materials
  9. Failing to promote your shop
  10. Not being fully accessible
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How User Centred Design Can Help Museums Put People at the Centre of the Exhibition Design Process

Jamie Taylor
Original paper on Museum Next >

User Centred Design (UCD) offers radical opportunities for user-driven exhibitions that fill a genuine need in people’s lives. It is a process that offers opportunity for continuous improvement based on insights from your visitors.

Chances are you’ve heard of UCD before. Designers use it to create intuitive and pleasurable experiences for people using their products. This is called the user experience (UX). It is the result of a series of considered and deliberate choices that are tested, reviewed and amended to meet a user’s needs.
When working with UCD, it’s vital that you test as much as you can. This can be done by specialists or it could be something that you do yourself. Whatever you’re able to do, do it early and do it often. An early test with three people is likely to be more use to you than a late test with thirty. Not only will three people likely pick up most of the big problems, you also have time to fix them before you have progressed too far. Be realistic about what you can change. It’s likely that you won’t have the resources to fix everything so instead concentrate on those that will make the biggest impact on your visitors.
The UCD process can be thought of as five overlapping planes. These are strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface. By completing each plane in order and testing the results, you are working towards turning an abstract idea into a UX that works for your visitors.
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Livestreaming and museums: making museums truly accessible

Rebecca Carlsson
Original paper on MuseumNext >

From social media to video streaming, technology plays an essential role in how we connect with the world around us. We rely on it for work, information and entertainment, and over the past twenty years it has completely revolutionised the way we access and engage with content.
It is therefore no surprise that museums are looking to utilise technology in order to help draw in crowds, enrich their exhibitions, and extend reach. And one of the most effective tools for achieving this aim is undoubtedly livestreaming.
Livestreaming is a medium that allows museums to beam their exhibits and activities to screens around the world, increasing audience engagement with, and recognition of, the museum’s offering. But how can a museum utilise livestreaming in an effective way? And how big of a role can it really play in growing a museum’s impact and achieving success?

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How museums use tone of voice to reveal their hidden personalities

Anna Faherty
Original paper on MuseumNext >

What does your museum sound like? I’m not referring to the chatter of schoolchildren or the ambient hum of dehumidifiers. I mean what do the words you use in marketing, wayfinding and interpretation sound like? More usefully, who do these words sound like?

Every piece of written communication produced by a museum tells visitors something about who the organisation is and what it stands for. The words, punctuation and sentence structures museums employ – and the perspectives they take – have power. They may invite and engage; they more bore or even exclude.

Imagine someone visiting your museum for the first time. Do the external signs sound warm and welcoming? Does the entrance signage invite them in or put them off? Does the wayfinding include terms they understand? Does the interpretation appreciate their lived experience and value their point of view? Does it sound like words pumped out by a faceless institution or does it feel like it was written by a living, breathing individual, complete with personal experience, emotions and flaws?

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Mixed Reality Brings Liberation Struggle to Life at Paris Museum

By Manuel Charr
Original paper on MuseumNext >

A modern take on the historic struggle to liberate the French capital from Nazi oppression has been launched at the Museum of the Liberation of Paris. The museum, which opened in 1994 as the Musée Jean Moulin in honour of one of the Resistance’s greatest heroes, has since been renamed and it is now a pioneer of ground-breaking mixed reality technology. The Microsoft system, HoloLens, has been deployed in the museum to bring much of the final struggle to overturn the German invaders to life.

According to Nino Sapina and Diego Fernandez-Bravo of Realcast – the mixed reality specialists who developed the high-tech visitor experience – the opportunity to use HoloLens at the museum was an exciting one. The museum is situated in a government bomb shelter that was first constructed in 1938. However, the site was left unoccupied during the period of Nazi takeover in the French capital from June 1940 onwards. It ended up being used as a base for some of the Resistance networks that sprung up in Paris. As of August 1944, following D-Day, it became the centre of operations for the Resistance as the Paris uprising began.

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3D printing is helping museums in repatriation and decolonisation efforts

By Myrsini Samaroudi and Karina Rodriguez Echavarria
Original paper on MuseumNext >

Manchester Museum recently returned items taken from Australia more than 100 years ago to Aboriginal leaders, the latest move in an ongoing debate over calls to “repatriate” museum artefacts to their countries of origin.
It’s part of a wider discussion over to what degree museums need to reform and “decolonise” away from displaying collections that were gathered or stolen from other countries during the colonial era, in a way that portrays foreign cultures as strange or inferior and other nations as unsuitable possessors of the world’s cultural heritage and knowledge. Major institutions including the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum have been caught up in the debate.
One way forward may be found in digital technologies that can enable people to access representations of other cultures in fair, interesting ways, without cultural institutions needing to hold on to controversial artefacts. For example, with 3D imaging and 3D printing we can produce digital and physical copies of artefacts, allowing visitors to study and interact with them more closely than ever before.

Copying artefacts

Copying artefacts has a surprisingly long history. Many ancient Greek statues that we have today are actually Roman copies made hundreds of years after the originals. Famous Renaissance artists’ workshops regularly produced copies of artwork. In the 19th century, museums produced copies through processes that involved making a mould of the original item, such as casting and electrotyping. The famous diplodocus skeleton “Dippy” actually exists as a number of copies in museums all over the world.

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