The Objects of Experience

Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums

Elizabeth Wood, Kiersten F Latham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611322149
• eBook ISBN: 9781315417752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

What if museums could harness the emotional and intellectual connections people have to personal and everyday objects to create richer visitor experiences? In this book, Elizabeth Wood and Kiersten Latham present the Object Knowledge Framework, a tool for using objects to connect museum visitors to themselves, to others, and to their world. They discuss the key concepts underpinning our lived experience of objects and how museums can learn from them. Then they walk readers through concrete methods for transforming visitor-object experiences, including exercises and strategies for teams developing exhibit themes, messages, and content, and participatory experiences.

SECTION 1

Thinking About Objects

In this section we explore what it means to think about and know objects in museum settings. We focus on the way that museums can better understand human-object encounters and harness these moments to build better museum experiences. In Chapter One we introduce the ideas of lived experience and how experiences of “knowing” objects in different ways can play an important role in the overall museum process. We present a first look at the Object Knowledge Framework and explain its role and how it suggests new directions for museum practice. As we explore the Framework our goal is to look closely at the connections between three different dimensions of object knowledge. Chapter Two provides an in-depth look at the features of the Object Knowledge Framework and begins to explore the opportunities museums have in making connections with museum visitors. The chapter presents an array of concepts about objects in the world generally, and more specifically within museum settings.

CHAPTER ONE

Object Knowledge

The relationships that people have with objects are as varied as objects themselves. Equally different are the ways that people come to know those objects. In part, these diverse ways of knowing stem from an individual’s motivation and interests. For example, those who wish to preserve objects for a future generation might focus on the role of an object as something intended for posterity, like donating artworks in support of a new wing for an art museum. Some objects, such as the first dollar bill a restaurant earned, show future viewers evidence of events that occurred in the past. Communities might use objects as examples of shared experiences or traditions, like the butter sculptures found at many state fairs. A museum visitor may know an object as something that provides entertainment, furthers their education, or serves as a touchstone for their life experiences. Each of these instances highlights the informational aspects of the object in relation to different groups. However, they also indicate other ways of knowing objects than just “facts”: knowing happens through a person’s senses, memory, emotions, and most of all, identity. These alternative ways of knowing objects—the personally and emotionally connected relationships with objects—provide the greatest insight into a new realm for museum work.

As museums continue to define and refine their purposes and roles in communities, and strive to make stronger connections for visitors in their learning and meaning making, it is vital that they pay close attention to their visitors’ personal connections to objects. Doing so means that museums will grapple with the idea that the content and meaning of their collections are different for every visitor who comes to see them. In part, these revisions reflect the transition from older, hierarchical models where the collections were typically more important than visitors. Conn (1998) suggested that the museum field must make a shift away from a nineteenth century sense of “object-based epistemology,” which emphasized the facts and explanation of an object and gave order to the meaning of objects primarily through their visual arrangement. Instead, the idea of an “object-based dialogue” underscores the importance of a shared process: “the object, the presentation, the visitor, even the friends and family accompanying the visitor, jointly participate in an act of meaning” (Wertsch, 2002, p. 115).

Creating opportunities for visitor meaning making is now the preeminent task of most museum and other informal learning methods (Falk & Dierking, 2000; Gurian, 2006; Roberts, 1997). Developing experiences for people that build on their prior knowledge of the world and lead them toward new ideas and conceptions is at the root of contemporary theories of transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000). While meaning making strategies have most recently been at the core of visitor-centered experiences in particular, the study of the role that objects play in this process, particularly in museums and informal learning environments, has had limited exposure.

In some contemporary museums, the idea of experience now drives museum planning and management. Finding the right strategies to satisfy a visitor’s experience—from amenities such as cafes and gift shops to the topics and content of exhibitions and programs—can dominate the activities of nearly all types of museum workers. In this context, there are some notable museum teams who reconstructed the role of objects within their museum. These renovations are excellent examples of institution-wide philosophical changes that can affect the visitor experience of museum objects dramatically. They are more than a face-lift: they are a large-scale redesign of the role and purpose of museum experiences and activities and are changes to the whole network of the museum. For example in 2006, the Oakland Museum of Art in California (OMCA) undertook a major transformation of philosophy, practice, and process that led to new ways of thinking about creating museum experiences with both visitor and object at the center. This process led the museum’s staff through countless discussions, prototypes, evaluation and listening sessions, and conversations about what visitors wanted and needed from their experience at the museum. When reflecting on the process for selecting objects, René de Guzman (2010), senior curator of art, wrote:

I found it surprising that so much drama surrounded inanimate objects. The curators defended the integrity of pure experience of the object, the educators fought for the object’s ability to communicate to a general public, and the conservators and registrars wanted to protect the object from physical dangers and harm. (p. 89)

The Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, underwent a major rebranding and mission revision between 2004 and 2006 to focus on the core components of its collection of toys in order to build a more viable visitor experience through the idea of play. The staff worked to find ways to make meaningful connections between visitors and the museum’s objects. By recalibrating its focus from a museum about dolls and toys (just objects) to one about play (people and objects) the museum became more evocative for its targeted family audience. Both the OMCA example and the Strong Museum example demonstrate how focusing on an inclusive museum experience for visitors—one which emphasizes objects and visitor interests, ideas, and interpretations—can result in a meaningful change for visitors, museum staff, and overall perception of public value.

Our goal throughout this book is to provide readers with discussion and examples of how objects play a role in visitor meaning making in museum settings. In particular we focus on the balance between museum visitor personal experience, the knowledge and experience of museum staff, and the unique opportunities museums have in creating meaningful encounters with objects. To do this we first investigate the idea of “lived experience” and explore the different ways that visitors come to know and make sense of objects not only in their everyday lives, but also in museum settings.

Lived Experience and the Museum

Ellen Rosenthal, executive director of Conner Prairie Living History Park in Fishers, Indiana, describes the park’s goals as “treat[ing] history not as something completed, but as something lived, something that grows out of people’s experiences and understanding” (Rothstein, 2011, p. C2, emphasis added). This lived experience is difficult to describe, and even harder to anticipate, but it is the root of a new way of thinking about the visitor-object encounter in museums. The human urge to seek and make meaning of objects is not generally obvious in everyday activity, and people don’t often think about these meanings until they are brought to their attention or revealed to them in some specific way. This is one benefit of using objects in the museum experience: when a visitor’s encounter with a museum object raises an awareness in them, they may intentionally seek out a deeper meaning of that object through investigation or inquiry. Certainly, not every object in a museum will trigger this connection, but when it does, that’s when the “museum magic” starts to happen (Silverman, 2002).

The lived experience of visitors in the museum, and in particular their lived experiences with objects, is the starting point for the Object Knowledge Framework. Building this perspective for working with the lived experience with objects takes into account the different ways to know an object. In particular, the goal is to better understand the human connection and attachment to objects. The Object Knowledge Framework unites the best of contemporary museum practices, and what a museum staff knows about the objects in their collections, with an appreciation for the interests, prior knowledge, and potential personal experiences of the visitors.

The lived experience of something occurs when a person is aware of an experience he or she is having while it is happening. It is, however, not something that a person can make meaning of in the moment they experience it. Instead, people make meaning of a lived experience after the event occurs, often only when they intentionally reflect on it. Imagine hearing your favorite song on the radio: your first reaction might be, “Hey, this is my favorite song, turn it up!” You become aware of what you are hearing and in the moment, take an action (dance, sing, wiggle, smile). Only later, perhaps when prompted, will you be able to explain what hearing that song means to you. The lived experience with an object—knowing the meaning and importance of something—is not just immediate or passing knowledge: it is the kind of knowledge that a person has on deep emotional, physical, and psychological levels. Yet, even this kind of understanding of an object can be hard to process without time for reflection. The more that a person actively connects to and thinks about his or her encounter with an object, the more he or she becomes aware of the experience.

The concepts of lived experience, of intentional focus, and of awareness of those experiences are all part of a philosophy called phenomenology. These ideas are threaded throughout this book and form the basis for the Object Knowledge Framework; knowing and using the key principles of phenomenology are especially powerful when applied in the museum setting to stimulate visitor experiences with objects.

Phenomenology is an approach to studying human experience; it does not separate objective and subjective meaning into different categories. Instead, it emphasizes an immediate, sensorial and individual way of seeing the world. Put another way, the outlook of phenomenologists is to use direct experience to understand the many different ways that people come to know the world around them. Most notably though, phenomenologists hold that each person’s experience of the world is relative to their own perspective, and it is through this way of knowing that the person is able to make sense of the world around them. Phenomenology is the study of a person’s active involvement in the meaning making process, and it helps enhance the overall ways of understanding and knowing the world around us.

Studying the visitor experience of objects phenomenologically can give museum professionals insights into the visitor’s lifeworld: the immediate, dynamic, and direct world that every person inhabits. The lifeworld is something that each person has, and is always and already there to encounter and be encountered. Imagine a person surrounded by an imaginary bubble: this bubble is the person’s lifeworld. The extent of the bubble carries the person’s immediate present, their past and their future, and moves with them wherever they go. That bubble becomes part of each environment the person encounters, contributes to it, and is potentially changed by it. As the person goes through the world, he or she see things and knows them in a meaningful way, both in terms of shared knowledge and individual meaning. Each person’s bubble is unique—yet, because it is permeable, the meaning the person makes is something that can be accessible to or shared among many different people. In a museum experience, the same principle of the lifeworld applies. Each person’s bubble potentially changes when they come into the museum and experience the exhibits. What a person sees comes through all the dimensions of that bubble. An exhibit might elicit a sense of awe and reverence from a wide range of visitors, and that same exhibit may create different levels or types of feelings for individual visitors. At the EMP Museum in Seattle, fans of Jimi Hendrix can revel in seeing actual guitars that he played (and destroyed), while many others might stand and look bemusedly, trying to figure out what the big deal is.

Phenomenology concerns itself with experience, and in particular recognizes that knowing the world is being in the world, experiencing it. That conception means that people are in effect not separate entities from each other, but rather entwined with the world around them. This is why it can be so hard to truly see how objects influence human experience. Phenomenologists call the idea of this interwoven person-world intentionality. It means that as human beings we exist in a world surrounded by objects that are already there, and we cannot avoid them. Given these circumstances we have relationships with those objects. Some relationships with objects are givens because we are familiar with them and have become used to them. Other things in the world are unfamiliar to us, and we become aware of them because of that variation. A chair, for example, is a common object for most people; in the modern world we grow up with chairs and know generally what they are and how to use them. A chair has a certain set of features that make it a chair: a seat, a back, and some way to connect it to the floor, usually its legs. Some chairs are hard, some are squishy, some have arms, but they all have these general characteristics. People don’t need to work hard to know they see chairs when entering a room. In a sense, most things with “chair-ness” are background information based on prior experience until something different catches a person’s attention.

Now imagine a person walking into a room and seeing something unusual. All the cues in the room suggest that the thing might be a chair, but there’s something different about it. The whole thing looks like a tree; the back is very high and has branches at the top. There’s an element that looks like a stump, but it might actually be a place to sit. Seeing this difference causes the person to become very aware of that thing that might look like a chair. It draws their attention, and the person needs to consciously or purposefully use their prior experiences to try to make sense of it. They carefully examine a wide range of sensory inputs that helps determine what the thing is. In phenomenology, becoming acutely aware of the experience a person is having is called consciousness. Consciousness is a process of making sense of unusual perceptions. For example, a person might experience consciousness of a chair if it is particularly hard, soft, unusual looking, or unfamiliar. Similarly, if a person comes from a culture that does not have chairs, the object moves to the foreground of the experience because of its differences. All of these moments of awareness happen quickly.

Put most simply, consciousness is always the consciousness of something. This process of perception involves the body and works through the senses: humans live in and are conscious of the world through their bodies. Bodily knowledge incorporates the traditional five senses, as well as the sensations of time, space, and interpersonal awareness. All of these elements contribute to the way that a person can create meaning or make sense of his or her lived experiences. The meanings of lived experiences are actually quite prevalent in how people describe different events in their lives. A telephone advertisement, for instance, once suggested that through the phone one could “reach out and touch someone”—invoking bodily awareness that might come with talking to a person on the phone. The feeling that “time flies” is another example of a sensory perception through the body. Though it is a constant, people’s perception of time varies depending on the activity; that variation of experience is what makes people aware of the passage of time. Recognizing the role of consciousness in the study of visitor-object encounters gives museums ways to think about supporting visitors in their meaning making.

Using these principles of phenomenology, museum staff can better understand the ways that visitors experience exhibits and programs. The visitor encounters an environment of things in the museum, some of which might be background information, while the objects the visitor is less familiar with will advance to the foreground of their awareness. In short, the visitor’s life-world and their consciousness matter in how they ultimately experience a museum’s objects.

A World Consisting of Objects

In the study of phenomenology the idea of objects plays an important role. People are only able to make sense of their existence through things of the world (Heidegger, 1967). As mentioned earlier, this idea of an interconnected person-world reality is called intentionality. As people encounter objects, they begin to make sense of the world, and they make meaning from these experiences. An object is like a mirror: as a person gazes on an object, ideas are reflected back at them through the object. These ideas come from their own experiences, through their lifeworld. Imagine, then, what it means when someone encounters an object in a museum setting. Every object has the potential to support a visitor in making meaning, every object has the potential to reflect something back onto its view...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 Thinking about Objects
• SECTiON 2 Object Relationships
• SECTiON 3 Object Transformations
• References
• Index
• About the Authors