Measuring Experiences of Art in the Museum: Exploring Methodology for Getting It Right (original) (raw)

Evaluating tangible and multisensory museum visiting experiences: Lessons learned from the meSch project

This paper explores the potential of tangible and embodied interaction for encouraging a multisensory engagement with museum objects and artefacts on display, by means of focusing on the subtleties of devising and planning for evaluation and audience research. Measuring the impact of new technologies is one of the main challenges identified in the 2015 NMC Horizon report (Museum Edition). The challenge is even greater for emerging concepts, technologies, and approaches, such as the use of tangible and embodied interaction in museums and other Cultural Heritage settings. Taking as an example two case-studies from the EU meSch project, from Museon and Allard Pierson Museum in the Netherlands, we discuss our plan for devising and carrying out audience research so as to " document, " analyse, and interpret the impact of digitally enhanced, tangible, embodied, and multisensory museum visiting experiences. Our intention is to provide an honest account of the different strengths and weaknesses encountered for all evaluation methodologies that were used, namely observations, interviews, video data, questionnaires, meaning maps, and post-visit interviews. We also share and discuss lessons learned, insights and best practices that could be of benefit for museum and audience research professionals.

IMMERSED IN THE WORK From the environment to virtual reality. Inhabiting the museum: A history of physical presence from analog to digital exhibition spaces. Università degli Studi di Milano Statale

2022

From summer 2021 to spring 2022 the NXT Museum in Amsterdam has run the exhibition Shifting Proximities, meant to investigate the ways in which global events and developments, mediated by technologies “are continually shifting the proximities between us, both literally and metaphorically”. This study wants to offer an account which, starting from this exhibition experience, addresses the temporal variations of the relationship between museums, visitors and their bodies, trying to investigate the extent to which technological developments, associated and guided by changing epistemic paradigms, have contributed to influence display and curatorial choices and their relationship to the visitor’s body. In this interplay artistic intuition – intertwined with technical and creative innovations – will prove essential to trigger institutional changes, together with philosophical undertakings of the political ideologies that inform power dynamics in the museum system. The visitor’s body, in its materiality and motion habits, will be seen as engaging in continuously changing ways with the museum space, mirroring the evolving epistemological paradigms of its times. Through an historical account of bodily practices and customs across museum spaces, this study aims to discuss the ways in which citizens’ dives through museum halls have been and are used to establish socially shared ideas of art and knowledge.

The influence of the physical context and knowledge of artworks on the aesthetic experience of interactive installations

Current Psychology

In the current study, the influence of the physical context and the knowledge of artworks on the aesthetic experience of installation art is tested for the first time. We assessed non-experts in the field of art (N = 158) who viewed interactive installations in either the art gallery context or the classroom. Some participants knew both the artworks’ titles and the curator descriptions, some knew only the titles, and some had no contextual information. We tested both the aesthetic emotions and the aesthetic judgments. For the measurement of aesthetic emotions, we used the Self-Assessment Manikin approach including the traditional dimensions of affect and the measurement of recently-proposed dimensions such as origin or subjective significance. The study replicated previous findings that the gallery context enhances the aesthetic experience – both of art appreciation and aesthetic emotions. Moreover, our results showed that the emotions caused by viewing the installation in the galle...

Making Sense of Things: Constructing Aesthetic Experience in Museum Gardens and Galleries

Studies of museum behaviour in sociology often examine how external environments shape organizational practice. Through an ethnographic study, this article considers programmes for visitors with disabilities at a major metropolitan art museum and botanical garden to ask how 'sensory conventions' vary across museums, and with what effects. I trace how museum staff construct the aesthetic experience of art and nature differently to shape how visitors use their senses, and which senses they use, when interacting with museum collections. Examining aesthetic meanings across different kinds of museums reveals these institutions' differing local cultures and how such cultures affect visitor experience. In particular, aesthetic practices across museums facilitate varying opportunities for perception, and interactions that may privilege particular embodied capacities.

Journey to the Centre of the Museum: Cognitive, Object and Introspective User Experiences in a Design Museum

2017

This thesis applies an ethnographic approach to investigate museum visit practices, which shape user experiences in a design museum. Specifically, it explores individual users’ meaning making processes through the embodiment of thoughts and lived experiences. To frame the study, it takes on a phenomenological approach to investigate how the body, self, space, and objects relate with each other in the phenomenon of museum going. Four main questions guide the paper. First, why do users go the museum? Second, how do users interact and navigate the museum? Third, how do the senses influence the users’ interaction and navigation practices? And fourth, how do users create meanings of the different museum affordances that facilitate lived experiences? By using phenomenology as theory and a bricolage of qualitative methods, it becomes possible to uncover the relationship of users’ previous knowledge in setting the trajectory and navigation practices for their journey to and within the museu...

Design Factors in the Museum Visitor Experience

Over the past half-century, museums have evolved from being predominantly cultural repositories to playing an important social role as venues for educational leisure experiences. Accompanying this development has been an increased emphasis on optimising the visitor experience. The physical context of the museum has long been recognised as an important facet of the visitor experience (Falk & Dierking, 2000). However, the way that visitors perceive and respond to different types of exhibition environments on a holistic level has received relatively little research attention until recently. A key limitation in advancing research in this area has been a paucity of methods for quantifying and analysing visitor perceptions of the exhibition environment beyond simple measures of satisfaction. In order to address this gap, this thesis describes the development of a model for characterising how visitors perceive different exhibition environments – Perceived Atmosphere – and relates it to different facets of the visitor experience. As part of this study, a quantitative instrument known as the Perceived Atmosphere Instrument was piloted and refined. This allows the relationship between exhibition environment and visitor experience to be explored in greater depth. Development of Perceived Atmosphere was informed by environmental psychology, in particular environmental cognition, theories of spatial perception and the research field known as atmospherics (Kotler, 1974). Atmospherics is the study of the influence of retail environments and other service settings on customer attitudes and behaviour, and this study applied similar methods to a museum context. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected to explore and compare visitors’ perceptions of different exhibition environments at the South Australian Museum, a large natural and cultural history museum located in Adelaide, Australia. Qualitative data were collected through 12 pre-arranged accompanied visits to the museum, while quantitative data were collected from 602 visitors to the museum who agreed to participate in the study by completing a questionnaire that incorporated the Perceived Atmosphere Instrument. In addition, a small number of participants (n = 60) were unobtrusively tracked prior to completing the survey, allowing some preliminary analysis of the relationship between Perceived Atmosphere and visitor behaviour. Factor analysis of the 30 semantic differentials that comprise the Perceived Atmosphere Instrument produced a four factor solution interpreted as Vibrancy, Spatiality, Order and Theatricality. There were statistically significant differences between galleries on three of these four dimensions. These differences were interpretable in light of each gallery’s physical characteristics, but also indicate that a space’s perceived affordances are as important as its measurable physical properties. Of the Perceived Atmosphere dimensions, Vibrancy is the strongest predictor of affective, cognitive and behavioural engagement. Spatiality is a predictor of a sense of relaxation in the exhibition environment. There is a negative correlation between Order and a sense of cognitive overload. These results show that quantifying Perceived Atmosphere in an exhibition setting is technically feasible, theoretically coherent and capable of providing novel and useful insights into the environment-experience relationship. As well as advancing our theoretical understanding of the environment-experience relationship in the museum context, these findings make practical and methodological contributions to the field. The Perceived Atmosphere Instrument is a novel, easy-to-administer research tool that can be applied to a wide range of museum settings. The ability to characterise exhibition environments by their Perceived Atmosphere properties, in particular Vibrancy, Spatiality and Order, will be useful for exhibition planners, designers and evaluators.

(2016) The Choreography of the Museum Experience: Visitors’ Designs for Learning, The International Journal of Arts Education, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 1-13

2016

Abstract: This paper acknowledges the multimodal and social nature of the museum experience. In this paper, we advocate the view that, within this multimodal frame, visitors are agents of their own design for learning as they engage with the exhibition and each other, redesigning the stories told by the curators. Audio-visual data from two individual projects in the UK illustrate the multimodal, embodied and social nature of the museum experience, which is often assumed to be ocularcentric and logocentric, and suggest that visitors learn by constantly making selections and transformations of the exhibition design, based on their own interests and responses to the various prompts emerging in and through social interaction. As such, the data analysis foregrounds the modes of movement, gaze, deixis and posture, which, alongside speech, are integral elements of the learning experience. Shifting our research focus on visitors’ redesigns of the exhibition poses a challenge to the curatorial design and has implications for exhibition-makers as it calls into question the assumptions of what should be learned and why, as well as how the resources in the exhibition space should be organised. Keywords: Museums, Multimodality, Designs For Learning, Visitors, Social Interaction

Inhabiting the museum: a history of physical presence from analog to digital exhibition spaces

An-Icon Studies in environmental images, 2023

From summer 2021 to spring 2022 the Nxt Mu-seum in Amsterdam has run the exhibition Shifting Proximities, meant to investigate the ways in which global events and de-velopments, mediated by technologies “are continually shifting the proximities between us, both literally and metaphorically.” This study wants to offer an account which, starting from this exhibition experience, addresses the temporal variations of the relationship between museums, visitors and their bodies, trying to investigate the extent to which technological devel-opments, guided by changing epistemic paradigms, have contributed to influence display and curatorial choices and their relationship to the visitor’s body. In this interplay artistic intuition – intertwined with technical innovations – will prove essential to trigger institutional changes, together with phil-osophical undertakings of the political ideologies that inform power dynamics in the museum system. The visitor’s body, in its materiality and motion habits, will be seen as engaging in continuously changing ways with the museum space, mir-roring the evolving epistemological paradigms of its times. Through an historical account of bodily practices and customs across museum spaces, this study aims to discuss the ways in which citizens’ dives through museum halls have been and are used to establish socially shared ideas of art and knowledge.