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