Interpretive Planning for Museums

Integrating Visitor Perspectives in Decision Making

Marcella Wells, Barbara H Butler, Judith Koke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781611321579
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315426198
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Museum professionals' increased focus on visitors in recent years has been demonstrated by, among other things, the enhanced practice of evaluation and the development of interpretive plans. Yet too often, these efforts function independent of one another. This book helps museums integrate visitors' perspectives into interpretive planning by recognizing, defining, and recording desired visitor outcomes throughout the process. The integration of visitor studies in the practice of interpretive planning is also based on the belief that the greater our understanding, tracking, and monitoring of learners, the greater the impact museums will make on public understanding of the science and humanities disciplines. An approach that advocates thoughtful and intentional interpretive planning that constantly integrates visitor perspectives is the next step in working with, rather than for, our communities; a step toward truly becoming visitor-centered and impactful as essential learning institutions of the 21st century.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1. TRUE STORY: DEVELOPING WITHOUT A PLAN

A well-established, successful, midsize history museum begins a process for mounting a new permanent exhibition. Having received a planning grant from a national foundation, the curatorial and education staff meet to begin “planning”—in this case, beginning with a topic, a list of possible objects and photos from the collections, and a brief content outline.

As the staff continues to develop the objects list and content outline, planners contract with a local exhibit design firm to develop schematic ideas and eventual design drawings. Some weeks later they hire an evaluator to conduct an evaluation of exhibit concepts and possible interactive elements. A few months later they submit a planning grant report to the foundation containing a theme document, design drawings, object lists, final label copy, and the evaluation report.

This scenario is all too familiar in some museums and informal learning settings: exhibit ideas are spawned, often prompted by the collections, and the development process begins. A grant proposal is submitted, funding is secured, and artifact selection, content development, and design development begin. Depending on the institution or the situation, sometimes an outside contractor (e.g., exhibit designer, evaluator, content specialist) is brought into the process. An exhibition is installed leaving many decisions undocumented and often leaving fundamental questions unanswered. Questions such as why the exhibition is important, who are the intended audiences, and what are desired visitor outcomes may be addressed in a grant application, but too often responses to these questions are not clearly articulated and made transparent to stakeholders of the project including museum staff, contractors, institution partners, and other funders.

The impetus for a new exhibit or interpretive project can come from any of a number of sources—donors, board members, museum staff, a community leader, or a “friend” of the institution. For example:

• Has a new CEO or board president, passionate about a favorite topic, ever directed the staff of your institution to develop a new exhibit on that topic?

• Has one of your staff rediscovered a fascinating object in the collection and approached the director about wanting to develop an exhibit on that object or that part of the collection?

• Has a wealthy patron offered a gift with the stipulation that the museum should develop an exhibition about that topic?

• Has a donor wanted to control the content of the exhibit because he or she holds the purse strings?

Despite the reality of these and similar situations, we contend that planners need to consider, from the start, questions such as: Why do this project at this time? How does this exhibit fit within the mission of the institution (or within the vision for the institution in the community or in society at large)? What community need would it fill? Who are the audiences and what do they know or care about the proposed topic? What role does the institution want the exhibit to play in public understanding of, or engagement with, the topic? What resources, issues, and ideas led up to the decision to go ahead with the exhibition? What do we want this exhibit to be about—in general and specifically? Who is the team that will to work on this project? How should the process of realizing this exhibit be organized? Who will coordinate or manage the process?

This book is about deliberate and systematic planning for visitor experiences—interpretive planning. We define interpretive planning, underscoring the importance of integrating visitor perspectives and input into that planning as well as the need to be systematic and logical in decision making as it relates to visitor experiences in and with museums. We advocate critical thinking, deliberation, and collaboration. At the same time, the approaches we present take into account the need for institutions to remain nimble, honoring the need for flexibility in decision making. Although we describe processes, we also recognize that, depending on an institution’s mission, size, location, audience, and community, the ability to adapt the processes to idiosyncratic situations and needs is essential.

1.2. THE NEED FOR THIS BOOK

Issue 1. Arbitrary Decision Making

Traditionally, museums have been object-centered institutions, and thus it is not unusual for the genesis of an exhibit to come from a director, donor, funder, individual staff member, or political leader who has an affinity for a particular idea, topic, or object. This situation can result in decision making that is arbitrary, inefficient, ineffective, or unsustainable.

In our opening story, the institution was compelled by a particular topic and a set of objects. They probably had a well-intentioned and reasoned audience-based purpose, but if conversations about that purpose did take place, the institution did not formally document their thinking about visitor perspectives or other related factors that shaped their decisions. If deliberations did indeed take place prior to launching into the exhibit development process, the logic and written record of those deliberations were not apparent. A written record may not immediately seem important to the institution’s staff, but through the life of the project the implications of decisions may affect numerous stakeholders, including board members, funders, educators, designers, evaluators, community leaders or partners, and contractors, and writing them down will add considerably to accountability and transparency. Money and time are wasted and professionalism is threatened if any of these stakeholders has to probe the institution to address rationale, outcomes, target audiences, or other impact-related issues. In this book we present recommended processes for discussing and recording intentional and thoughtful decisions related to visitor experiences with museums.

Issue 2. Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA)

In 1993 the U.S. Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), legislation that refocused the attention of federal funding agencies to accountability and outcomes. Gradually, throughout the 1990s, the trickle-down effect of this legislation began to be felt in museums, initially resulting in new expectations for federally funded projects but also affecting how museums thought about, tracked, and demonstrated success. Consequently, federal funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS), and the National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) and Humanities (NEH), began mandating that informal learning grants address outcomes for all informal learning initiatives.

Around the same time, during the 1980s and 1990s, the growing field of visitor studies was focusing its attention on all things visitor: understanding who visitors are (demographically and psychographically); exploring visitor conceptions, misconceptions, and perspectives related to exhibit topics; and researching visitor needs and the outcomes of visitor experiences. Some of these efforts, particularly front-end evaluations, targeted what we can learn about visitors before their museum visit. Other visitor studies (formative evaluation efforts in particular) target what we can learn about visitor perspectives during exhibit design and development processes. Still other visitor studies efforts (i.e., summative evaluation) target what visitors take away from their experiences in museums or how they are changed or transformed by those experiences. Although the passage of GPRA catalyzed visitor studies by spotlighting outcomes and impact, the ideas related more broadly to visitor perspectives have been slow to make their way into the lifeblood of museums.

Issue 3. Leisure Time and Choice

Chubb and Chubb, in their book One Third of Our Time? (1981), embraced the notion that, in the United States, one-third of people’s time is discretionary, and some of that time is likely to be spent on leisure pursuits. However, according to Juliet Schor, in the past several decades leisure time has become a “conspicuous casualty of prosperity” (1991, 2). Schor’s leisure research documents a gradual but steady rise in the amount of time Americans spend at their jobs, and, because the total time spent per day at work is now greater than it was in the 1940s, time for leisure pursuits has diminished. At the same time, and for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is technology (e.g., social media, gaming), people today have a much larger array of leisure choices than ever before.

Indeed, leisure choice is complex. A full discussion of that topic is beyond the scope of this book, but it is germane here to recognize that, afforded precious little time for leisure, people desire different things at different times to fulfill different leisure needs. As Marcella and her colleague Ross Loomis (Wells and Loomis 1998) offer, museum opportunities involve multiple and concurrent choices related to activity (museumgoing versus other possible activities), setting (e.g., science center, history museum, art museum), experience preferences (e.g., be with friends and family, explore, have fun, be active), and perceived benefits (e.g., skill enhancement, family solidarity). Collectively, museums compete with sporting events, outdoor recreation, shopping, travel, movies, and technology to gain a foothold in people’s leisure time. Without doubt, museums are among Americans’ leisure opportunities, but they are only one of myriad (and increasingly diverse) leisure choices that people make daily. Given this competitive context, the need for deliberate and systematic planning and decision making in museums is significant.

Issue 4. Changing Paradigm of Education

The nature of education and learning is changing. As Kratz and Merritt suggest, “the U.S. education system is on the cusp of transformational change” (2011, 188). These authors discuss how growing dissatisfaction with the formal education system and the proliferation of nontraditional forms of education are destabilizing current education structures in the country. Sir Ken Robinson (2008) describes this destabilizing a bit differently by saying that our traditional education system—a system rooted in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution—still resembles the factories of that revolution, with students moved along assembly lines of learning in batches of same-age cohorts. He argues that, despite significant cultural and societal changes (e.g., technology, changing demographics, and social reform attempts), the current education system is trying to meet the future by doing what has been done in the past. He argues that rather than anesthetizing learners using the traditional factory model we should be waking them up by stimulating their imaginations and creativity. The concept of structuring learning by way of thinking (e.g., critical thinking, decision making, moral reasoning, judgment, leadership) is not new. Tagged “21^st Century Skills,” these ideas are embraced in some charter schools; lab schools; science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) schools; and even by some homeschoolers. Museum and museum education program planners also are beginning to focus on these skills.

The torch of educational reform is being carried by others as well. KnowledgeWorks, a think tank associated with the Institute for the Future, presents a context for thinking about the future of learning that is not limited to K–12 education (KnowledgeWorks 2008). These thinkers acknowledge several economic, societal, organizational, systemic, and personal trends that foreshadow a significant transformation in education in the United States—a transformation that includes, among other things, contested authorities, diversified learning geographies, personalized learning philosophies, and a global learning economy.

The groundswell of concern about public education and reform in recent decades may actually portend a significant transformation in education and learning on a broader scale. The Learning Landscape that we present here in graphic form in Figure 1.1 reflects some of the speculations by educators, sociologists, futurists, and others concerned with the challenge of literacy in the new millennium.

Figure 1.1 Learning Landscape

First, our Learning Landscape suggests that lines are increasingly blurred between formal learning, which is mostly extrinsically motivated and facilitated (e.g., K–12 public education), and other types of learning termed nonformal learning, which is intrinsically motivated but still facilitated (such as Boy Scouts, Elderhostel), and informal learning, which is intrinsically motivated and self-directed (such as visits to museums, libraries, and parks). Second, the Learning Landscape captures the concept of lifelong learning and how needs, interests, and desires for leisure (and learning) may change across an individual’s life course as influenced by work, family, aging, and many other factors. Third, the Learning Landscape suggests learning progressions related to topics or subjects that are not necessarily tied to life course. For example, a PhD in physics, dedicated in life course to expert knowledge in that area, might visit a museum exhibit about the Civil War while on vacation and expand a novice knowledge of that topic based on an occasional hobby of collecting military paraphernalia.

Finally, the Learning Landscape arrays multiple opportunities for learning across time and space. The opportunities shown are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive; rather, the array within the three axes suggests a vast set of possible choices that involve engagement and learning. The Learning Landscape shows that, as learning and education take on new meaning in the near future, opportunities for museums to make a significant contribution to learning in the United States (and ultimately to national literacy) have never been greater (National Research Council 2009).

Issue 5. Shrinking Dollars

Difficult economic times, shrinking government funding, evaporating interest earnings, and in some cases decreasing philanthropic donations are increasingly forcing museums to make tough decisions about allocating resources and setting priorities. A 2008 report from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) indicates that while sources of income in the museum sector are diverse, governmental monetary support to non-government-administrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceptual Foundations
• 3 Interpretive Planning
• 4 The Outcomes Hierarchy
• 5 Integrating Visitor Perspectives in Master Interpretive Planning
• 6 Integrating Visitor Perspectives in Project Interpretive Planning
• 7 Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix A Example of Outcomes Hierarchy Used as an Executive Summary of Visitor Perspectives
• Appendix B Sample Tables of Contents of Interpretive Plans
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• About the Authors