Meaningful Museum Experiences: Initial Findings

As museum professionals, we all likely find great meaning in what we do, and hope that we are providing the most meaningful, memorable, and engaging experiences to our visitors.  We also understand that doing so is likely going to be absolutely crucial as competition for precious leisure time, other educational options, and philanthropic dollars, becomes even fiercer.  How do museums set themselves apart? 

 

In our last post, we laid out why it is important to understand what adults find most meaningful in museum experiences, not only because that is what a museum is supposed to do, but also for future sustainability.  That is, museums that don’t understand how it is they can be most meaningful may find themselves increasingly irrelevant.

To begin to crack this very complex nut, we first examined the over 4,400 adult meaningful museum experiences we gathered in our latest field-wide research, and coded them for what type of museum is being described.  Some respondents said very clearly, naming the specific museum where they had had their most meaningful experience.  Others were clear enough from context, mentioning paintings, historic spaces, or science experiments.  And some were too vague to tell.  We ended up coding all of the responses into the following museum genres:

• Art museums
• History-based museums (museums, historic sites, etc.)
• Science centers
• Natural history or anthropology museums
• Other types (zoos, botanical gardens, children’s, etc.)
• Too vague to tell

 

So what did we find?  First off, despite our asking respondents specifically to NOT tell us about experiences that involved friends and family members, about 10% of the sample answered about their children anyway.  We removed those responses from the sample, leaving us with nearly 4,000 responses to work with. (Note that we do consider the social/family aspect of museum visits to be very important, but that is a different topic and study; we wanted to stay focused on the individual adult experience with museums and their content).

 

The majority of the remaining responses were from art and history-based museums, each accounting for 28% of experiences shared.  Given our previous research delving into early childhood museum memories, these results did not surprise us as history and art museums also turn up in a large share of childhood memories.

What did surprise us a bit was that only 19% of responses recounted experiences from science centers/museums – a respectable showing, but not as high as we had hoped given the prevalence of science centers and how science and technology impacts our daily lives in meaningful ways.  Additionally, the experiences recounted about science centers tended to be more cursory and less detailed than those for art or history museums, again following a similar pattern we saw in our memory work. 

 

Our next post will explore the four major themes we found when we analyzed these meaningful museum experiences, and these themes will shed some light onto why art and history museums did rather well in creating environments conducive to the most meaningful experiences.

What do you think?  Simply click on “comments” below to share your thoughts (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).

Comments

[Paul Orselli]

Looking forward to finding out more about the four major themes!

[Michelle Moon]

Can't wait to read more. I wonder if the reason that "meaning" for adults isn't as evident in science museums is partly because they have geared themselves so strongly toward the youth audience? The experience design is usually active, fast-paced, bold. When I think of science museums, I think of spaces that lend themselves not so much to reflection as to action and cause/effect observation. They are usually large, cavernous spaces with bright, sometimes noisy, exhibits and frequent pop-up programs.

Yet it is possible to imagine meaningful moments being drawn from science museums - resources like planetariums, exhibits on life and environment, seem like they certainly could prompt deep insights, if well framed.

One example: I went with my parents to the Pompeii exhibit which was touring science museums last year, and it was definitely having an emotional/philosophical impact on people, even as it taught the urban geography of pompeii, dealt with archeological topics, and touched on basics of vulcanology with a recounting of the events that buried the city. The narrative, human frame around the science contained in the story helped bring the information home in a way I'd call meaningful.

[Patricia Dutra]

Very interesting and useful research! I will be following closely the next postings. Reflecting on the research findings, I was intrigued with the low number of responses related to meaningful experiences in Science Museums. One of my memorable experiences in museums was a visit to the Natural History Museum in London, particularly to the Darwin permanent exhibit about The Origin of the Species. His theory as well as the display of bones of our ancestors made a powerful and lasting impression on me.

Even though science is so embedded in our lives today, it is easier to feel connected with other people emotions and perspectives through their artistic expression in Art Museums, or to relate to the story of a Historic Museum, than to identify ourselves with science. I think that for this reason, exhibitions like “A Day in Pompeii” and “Lost Egypt: Ancient Secrets, Modern Science”, showed at the MOS and in other museums around the country, have been exploring the human connections behind the science involved. At the Lost Egypt, for example the visitor follows the mummification process of an unknown fourteen year old girl that after died in the Nile River, that was considered sacred, received the same treatment reserved for distinguished Egyptians. This tendency in Science Museums Exhibitions to underline the science description with a human narrative, maybe in a few years will lead to an improvement in the number of adult meaningful experiences in Science Museums.

[Susie Wilkening, Reach Advisors]

Thanks all of you for your comments! While we are in only a hypothesis-building phase for why meaning seems to be built more easily via art and history than via science, the hypotheses that Michelle and Patricia are throwing out are certainly similar to the ones we are discussing. More soon!

[JohnReid]

Very interesting site,thank you for this.Cheers! John.

[Bryony Freeman]

This is very interesting, I began researching into this for a project I am working on - I am studying visual communication illustration and my degree is very much based upon the feelings art work gives, the meaning behind it and creating this ourselves. I am planning on creating a visual memorial and want to make the piece a moving, capturing experience that would likely be exhibited in a museum for that kind of audience rather than an art gallery. But after reading all your posts I now want to change my dissertation topic to this! :)

[Rebecca Prosino]

This is Rebecca at Sci-Port in Shreveport. For the past two weeks we have had a visiting researcher on site from UT's developmental psychology department here surveying people who are exiting the traveling Titanic exhibition. She's researching magical contagion for her dissertation. You might be interested in her results! Contact me offline and I can put y'all in touch if you like. On another note, I think it is possible for iconic science center exhibits to develop the magic the longer they are here. Our visitors get upset when we move the Bed of Nails around, for example. It (and a couple others) seem to have some special juju (to use a Louisiana word).