4 Alex Burch denmark 2014
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Transcript of 4 Alex Burch denmark 2014
We Are Not Visitors
Alex Burch
Director of Learning
Science Museum Group
Role of Audience Research
• Happens before, during and after development
• Identifies gaps between visitors’ needs, wants and expectations – and those of the Museum
• Work with teams to implement interpretation/learning strategies
Different motivations for visitingSharon MacDonald
• A day out – a leisure activity, spending time with the family
• Life-cycle – a visit was something you did at a particular life-
stage. • Place
– one of the ‘things to do in London’, a destination• Education
– to learn something new
John Falk• Explorers
– Curiosity driven, with generic interest in the museum’s content• Facilitators
– Socially motivated, visit primarily focussed on enabling the experience and learning of others
• Professionals/Hobbyists– Motivated by a desire to sarisfy a specific content-related
objective.• Experience seekers
– Motivated to visit because perceive museum as important destination
• Rechargers– seeking contemplative or restorative experience.
Why Important?
As Falk states:
‘…visitors’ entering motivations appear to have a particularly strong and important influence on both in-museum experiences and learning’
In Understanding Museum Visitors’ Motivations and Learning. Museums Social Learning Spaces and Knowledge Producing Processes.
Credit: Dave Patten Credit: Scott Gunn Credit: Scott Gunn
Credit: Sarah Sosiak
Why Important?
Visitors have a script
That script is about the place
This profoundly influences expectations, behaviours and visitors’ approaches to content
We assume they spend a long time
Who Am I? • 14 object cases• 50 interactives• 1000 sq m floor area• Av. dwell time: 21mins.• Max. time: 103mins
Beverly SerrellThe study:• 8,507 visitors, • 110 exhibitions• 62 museums
Longest dwell time• 128 mins, • 1% ≥ 1 hour.• ≤ 20mins most common• On average, visitors at only
1/3 of the exhibition elements.
We also assume…
• That visitors start at the beginning• That they know the title of the exhibition• That what is iconic to us is to them• That they understand the themes of an
exhibition• They read the text
How visitor background and behaviour impact
Mechanical Brides
• ½ the audience understood the curatorial themes
Influencing factors:• Gender & college
education• Intentional visitors • Encountered adverts
Image courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk
What are we asking visitors to do?
Value/cost model
• Steve Bitgood – ‘attention-value’ model• Capturing attention is influenced by a number of
variables including the size, isolation and location of exhibit elements.
• Perceptual distractions are the most serious threats to sustained attention to exhibition elements.
• Higher value objects receive the most attention.– As the number of objects in the visitor’s visual field
increases, visitors will become more selective in that they will attend to a decreasing proportion available.
We assume visitors have the same understanding as us
Credit: Royterp
And we assume …
• They understand history
• And that adults know more than children
Visitors want more information…and less text
• Why is it here?• Who made it?• How did it affect people’s lives?• How does it work?
New types of exhibition
New forms of interpretation
V&A British Galleries
Concerns:• Distracting, intrusive, anachronistic, patronising
Research showed :• Deepened engagement with the object providing
context, animation, insight and information• Equal no. of adult and child users
New Platforms
• At Science Museum:• 80% smartphone• 50% tablet• 6% another internet
enabled device
• 2/3 are using this technology in the Museum
Not using • to download our apps• access more content
Are using:• Practically• creatively• socially
• Image Science Museum/Santiago Arribas-Pena
• Participants value viewing familiar objects in new ways
• Value seeing human behaviour from an outside perspective
“[The costume] made me think more about life; see myself in the third person.” (adult)
Thank you/Tak