Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience

John H Falk

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315427034
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Arqueología

Understanding the visitor experience provides essential insights into how museums can affect people's lives. Personal drives, group identity, decision-making and meaning-making strategies, memory, and leisure preferences, all enter into the visitor experience, which extends far beyond the walls of the institution both in time and space. Drawing upon a career in studying museum visitors, renowned researcher John Falk attempts to create a predictive model of visitor experience, one that can help museum professionals better meet those visitors' needs. He identifies five key types of visitors who attend museums and then defines the internal processes that drive them there over and over again. Through an understanding of how museums shape and reflect their personal and group identity, Falk is able to show not only how museums can increase their attendance and revenue, but also their meaningfulness to their constituents.

PART I Theory

Introduction: Museums and Their Visitors

DOI: 10.4324/9781315427058-1

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

—Albert Einstein

It’s a cool, rainy Saturday in early November in Baltimore, Maryland. If you are a local resident of Baltimore, what is there to do on such a day when you have relatives visiting from out of town? Not surprisingly, two separate local couples, each with visiting relatives, are converging on one of the major attractions in the area, the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Elmira Harris, her husband, their visiting son, and his wife are in one vehicle and George Johansson, his wife, and his wife’s visiting father are in another. Arriving within a half hour of each other, the two groups follow a similar drill—park, pay their admission, receive a map of the Aquarium, and begin their visit.¹

What can we say about the visitor experience of these two individuals, Elmira and George? Even more importantly, what can we predict about what they’ll do at the Aquarium and what meaning they’ll make as a consequence of their visit? Within this brief vignette, I’ve already provided what most museum professionals would currently consider the key pieces of information for answering these questions. To begin with, we know that both individuals visited the same museum, the National Aquarium in Baltimore. We know what the exhibitions at the Aquarium are, what information they contain, and what messages the Aquarium is trying to convey. We know which exhibits are considered the most “attractive” and which are less likely to be seen. For many in the museum community this is all we need to know—visitors come to see the exhibitions, they see the exhibitions, and they leave knowing about the exhibitions. However, years of visitor research has shown that there’s more subtlety to the issue; we need to know something about the visitor and the conditions of visit as well.

We know when the visit happened—the same time of year, same day of the week, and at almost exactly the same time of day. We also know that demographically Elmira and George were fairly similar—both were adults, local residents, infrequent visitors to the Aquarium, and middle class with some college education. The only major demographic differences were that George was white and in his 30s and Elmira was African American and in her mid-50s. In addition to this demographic information, we also know something about their reasons for visiting, which was again almost identical—a rainy day excursion in order to entertain visiting relatives. We even know their social grouping—an all-adult, family group. Given all of these commonalities it should follow that how these two individuals and their groups “use” the Aquarium, the pace of their visit, what they will attend to, and ultimately, even the meanings they make from the experience, would likely be similar. But minutes into the actual visit it becomes apparent that many, if not all, of these assumptions may not be valid.

It takes less than a minute for Elmira and her family to scatter. Elmira goes off in one direction, her husband in another, and her son and his wife in a third direction. Elmira heads straight upstairs towards the top-floor rainforest exhibit. Oblivious to the other visitors there, Elmira thoughtfully wanders around the displays in the rainforest area, reading labels, and carefully seeking out and watching the live creatures clinging to branches and tree trunks which like Elmira, also appear oblivious to visitors. After the rainforest exhibition, Elmira circles back down through the Aquarium against the flow of traffic, and takes in each of the various other parts of the Aquarium. She gives each her undivided attention, and she visits each by herself. Only after about two hours does Elmira rendezvous again with the rest of her family. The four family members gather for coffee in the Aquarium coffee shop and animatedly relate what they’ve seen and discovered.

In contrast, George, his wife, and father-in-law never leave each other’s side. They start at the beginning, at the bottom of the long ramping walkway, and slowly move through the first exhibit. As the visit proceeds, their pace accelerates. When they finally reach the top floor and the rainforest exhibition area, they mutually agree to skip it after glancing at their watches. During their visit, the three of them carry on a reasonably animated conversation, most of it having little relationship to what they are seeing or doing at the time. George’s father-in-law talks about the challenges he had in getting into town, the fact that the cab ride from the airport to their house was so expensive, and how bad the weather and the traffic was. George is then asked by his father-in-law how things are going with his job. Seemingly grateful to get beyond his father-in-law’s travel tirade, George enthusiastically talks about his work. Since he works in biotechnology and investigates how chemicals created by marine organisms can be used in pharmaceuticals, once or twice during the conversation George points to something he sees in one of the exhibits that helps him make a point or relates to the work he does. But after the initial flurry of exhibit-viewing, much of the visit is comprised of the three adults strolling along, chatting, and generally scanning back and forth across the Aquarium’s various exhibits. After about an hour, the three decide they’ve had enough and agree to head over to shops of the Inner Harbor for coffee and something sweet to eat before going back to the house.

Months later when I talked with Elmira and George, their recollections of the museum experience were quite different. Although both were able to share the basic outlines of the experience, which I have described here, the meanings they made from the experience were very different. For George, the Aquarium was a backdrop for his experiences; it was a fun and enjoyable setting in which to fulfill his social obligations for the day. Most of his memories were anecdotes about his father-in-law—some positive and some not so positive; little of what he spontaneously talked about related to the Aquarium exhibits or its creatures. By contrast, Elmira was just bursting with information about what she saw and learned at the Aquarium. Unprompted, she described the toucan, sloth, and iguana she saw, as well as various details from the labels she read. She was quite excited about the prospect of some day being able to travel to the tropics and actually seeing these creatures in the wild (something that is not anywhere on the horizon, but nonetheless still a goal for her). Only with prompting did she talk about her son and daughter-in-law. Clearly, George and Elmira’s experiences, as well as their memories of the experience, were very different from each other despite the apparent similarities at the outset.

What are we to make of these two visitors’ experiences that occurred on this day? How can we make sense of how different they were given the obvious similarities between their two situations? What do we actually know about why people go to museums, what they do there, and what meanings they make from that experience? The National Aquarium in Baltimore as an institution is quite committed to understanding more about the million-plus individuals who visit every year; they are eager to know why they come and what meanings they leave with. And the same is true for all the other zoos and aquariums in the world which collectively have hundreds of millions of visitors each year. In fact, the entire museum community—zoos, aquariums, art, history and natural history museums, children’s museums and science centers, botanical gardens, historical and heritage sites, nature centers and natural parks, and other such institutions—would like to know more about the approximately one billion individuals who visit annually. Despite seeming to possess all the information we needed to understand and predict what the museum visitor experiences of George and Elmira would be like—the nature of the museum, time of day, day of the week, time of year, demographic characteristics of the visitors, social group, and visit motivation—it’s clear these pieces of information were inadequate to the challenge. It seems hard to believe that these huge differences in experience could just be a function of Elmira and George’s different ages and race/ethnicity, though these seemed to be the only major differences between them. Maybe the task of understanding, let alone predicting the museum visitor experience is fundamentally impossible; it is perhaps impossible to make any useful generalizations about museum visitor experiences given how many visitors there are and how obviously unique each individual visitor is. That said, it certainly would be useful if we could!

From Nicety to Necessity

Although it was not always true, today most museums exist in order to attract and serve visitors—as many as possible. Although museums have long wondered about who visits their institutions, why and to what end, today they feel economically, socially, and politically compelled to do so. Today’s museum has no choice but to think seriously about who their visitors are and why they come, as well as about who does not visit and why not. Visitors are at the heart of the twenty-first century museum’s existence. Understanding something about museum visitors is not a nicety; it is a necessity! Asking who visits the museum, why and to what end are no longer mere academic questions. These are questions of great importance.

If we knew who visited museums and what meanings they took away from the experience, we would know something about the role that museums play in society. Likewise, we could also learn something about the societal role of museums from knowing more about why other people choose not to visit museums. If we knew something about who visited museums and what meanings they made we would also understand something about the role museums play in individual people’s lives. Buried within the construct we call the museum visitor experience lie answers to fundamental questions about the worth of museums—how museums make a difference within society, how they support the public’s understandings of the world as well as of themselves. These are all tremendously important issues, and these alone would be justification for trying to better understand the museum visitor experience. But there are more practical and pressing reasons the museum profession might have for improving its understanding, and if possible, its prediction of the museum visitor experience.

If we knew the answers to the questions of who goes to museums, what people do once in the museum, and what meanings they make from the experience, we would gain critical insights into how the public derives value and benefits from museum-going (or not, as the case may be) which we could use to improve museums. We live in an increasingly competitive world where every museum is competing for audiences and resources not only against other museums, but against an ever-growing collection of for-profits and non-profits. If museums are to maintain their current popularity and success, they will need to get measurably better at understanding and serving their visitors. Today, museums are among the most successful leisure venues in the world, but it is not a given that museums will always be popular and successful. Even if museums as a category remain popular, it is not assured that any particular museum will continue to be successful. The past decade has been challenging for most museums and the coming decade promises to be even more so. Financial support which was once abundant is now more limited; governments are cutting back and grant support is becoming more challenging to acquire. Individual donations are also becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and it requires ever more effort to maintain even current levels of support. As I write this book in 2008, it seems unlikely that any museum will escape unscathed from the worldwide financial and political turbulence. An enhanced understanding of audience, current and potential, has to be at the heart of any twenty-first century museum’s business model.² Asking who is the museum’s audience and how can we maximize the quality of the museum visitor experience should be the two questions that every twenty-first century museum should be asking. And not just once, but continuously! So we can see that making sense of museum visitors like Elmira and George and their families, as well as the many others who choose to devote a piece of their precious time to visiting a museum, is an important undertaking. It is also extremely daunting!

What We Think We Know About the Museum Visitor Experience

What do we know about our two museum visitors, Elmira and George? Were Elmira and George typical visitors? Could we have predicted that these two individuals and their families would visit the Aquarium on the day in question? What really motivated Elmira to visit? What really motivated George? What would their visit experience be like? What would they look at? What would they think about? What would make them satisfied with their experience? What would they remember? What would they learn? What do we know about the museum visitor experience in general, and based upon what we know, what would we have predicted about the visit experience of people like Elmira and George in particular? These should be fairly straightforward questions and in some ways, they are but in other very profound ways, they are anything but straightforward. As previously shown, our predictions about the museum experiences of Elmira and George based upon the “standard” tools proved to not be very useful. I would argue this is because we currently lack a real model of the museum visitor experience; we know what many of the pieces are, but we lack a comprehensive framework for knowing how all of these various pieces fit together and interact. In this book I intend to show that it is possible to understand the museum visitor experience. It is indeed a quite complex system, but not so complex as to be unknowable. Our inability to more accurately predict the visit experiences of George and Elmira derive not so much from a lack of knowledge about museums and visitors, but because historically we have tended to concretely focus on the pieces of the system, rather than think of the system as a dynamic whole. We have also missed what I believe is the key to the whole system—the important role that personal identity plays in the museum visitor experience.

As with any system, our understanding depends upon the lens through which we look at that system. Currently there are two main lenses that represent the beliefs that museum professionals hold about the nature of museums and their visitors. Both of these lenses reveal some of what’s important about the museum visitor experience. Each yields some insights into why people visit museums, what they do there, and what meanings they make from the experience. However, viewing the museum visitor experience through just one of these lenses, no matter which one is chosen, provides only ...