Abstract
Like any message, the meanings a museum exhibit has are determined
by the complex interaction of several elements: the configuration of sign
forms used in the design of the display, the predispositions and goals
visitors bring to the experience, and the physical and socio-cultural contexts
in which the interpretive activity takes place. This paper explores this
dynamic process of interpretation in a museum gallery, showing by means
of several examples how exhibits and visitors act upon each other in a
process of mutual influence. Demonstrating the principle that the meaning
of a display is neither in the eye of the beholder nor in the structure
of the display itself or the situation of the encounter between the two,
but in a lively triadic interplay of all three elements, the illustrations
also confirm the utility of a semio-cognitive approach to visitor behavior.
Introduction
This study was designed as a preliminary exploration of visitor experiences
in the Passport to the World gallery of the Indianapolis Children's Museum.
As a pilot study, it was meant to produce a tentative sketch of consumer
experiences out of which would be generated a series of hypotheses about
consumers' interpretations of the gallery which could be examined in depth
in subsequent investigations. It was also conceived of as a trial of various
methodologies which would then be refined in follow up studies. Ultimately,
it was seen as a first step in the development of a long-term program of
research on visitor behavior in a variety of museum settings.
The Passport gallery was designed to introduce museum visitors to many
cultures and to illustrate the "family of man" thesis that, underlying
the enormous surface diversity between cultures, there are deep, functional
similarities, defined in the gallery as the functions of celebrating, communicating,
imagining, and creating; (see Figure 1 for a floor plan of the gallery).
The complex gallery contains 54 permanent exhibits and several, volunteer-directed
temporary displays and activities, all housed in six, large, interconnected
rooms plus a balcony area overlooking the main rooms. Visitors encounter
a wide array of competing sights and sounds, varying from simple display
cabinets to large, free-standing micro-environments. Most of the displays
are designed to engage the visitor in hands-on interaction with the artefacts
being displayed.
Figure 1: Floor Plan of the Passport to the World Gallery, Indianapolis Children's Museum
An earlier tracking study carried out in the gallery
by museum research personnel had indicated that exhibits varied widely
in their ability to attract and hold the attention of visitors. While a
later study involving interviews with visitors concerning individual displays
had shown that most visitors understood the basic theme of the gallery,
it did not shed much light on specific experiences in the rich environment
of the gallery, nor did it explain these experiences in terms of the characteristics
of the exhibits and/or the patrons.
These earlier Passport studies had utilized what might be called the
mainstream or dominant model of museum evaluation. This model was developed
over the last twenty years based first on behaviorist, then cognitive models
drawn from computing, mathematics, information processing and cybernetics
and adopted for museum research via sociology and psychology. Using the
positivistic learning theories and survey methods of these fields, the
principal aim of evaluation in this model is to demonstrate the utility
of museum displays in order to justify their funding. "Hard" data is collected
which demonstrates control of visitor behavior through the "transmission"
of knowledge from curator to visitor (Lawrence 1991: 21). The dominant
framework of museum evaluation is characterized by a great concern for
scientific objectivity, a focus on the individual rather than the social
group, and an emphasis on the transfer of information rather than meaning.
The Passport gallery was designed in keeping with this model, with each
display described in terms of a list of its "behavioral objectives"‹specific
behaviors that should be performed by the visitor, leading to the transmission
of distinct pieces of information. Curators wanted to discover if these
behavioral objectives were being met for different displays. When traditional
evaluation was carried out in the gallery, however, staff found that learning
that these bits of information had been communicated left them with little
understanding about the meaning the gallery visit had for visitors.
Like the museum staff who took part in the Getty focus group project (Insights
1990), the what was needed was a study aimed at meaning rather than information.
As in adjacent fields, over the last few years the changing paradigm
in the human sciences has begun to infiltrate museum evaluation studies,
with semiotic and critical approaches being adopted from media studies,
cultural studies, semiotics, sociology à la Bourdieu, and other
"post-Saussurean humanities" (Lawrence 1991: 24; see also Umiker-Sebeok
1992). While these borrowings are still scattered and eclectic within museum
studies, taken as a whole they represent the beginning of a critical shift
toward a new model of human behavior and society. This new model incorporates:
-use of a pragmatic, Peircean model of semiosis, where emphasis is on the active, contextualized process of interpretation, with the goals of interpreters as the crucial frame rather than simple sign-meaning correlations. In a museum setting, this entails the rejection of the idea that the methods of positivistic science are the only appropriate ones for evaluation. Evaluations are "not descriptions of some true state of affairs but represent meaningful constructions that...actors form to make sense of the situations in which they find themselves, [and] these constructions are inextricably context and value-linked and...may well serve to enfranchise or disfranchise stakeholding groups" (Guba and Lincoln 1989: 8-9, as cited in Lawrence 1991).
-an enactive approach to cognition, where cognition is seen as
embodied and, in the case of museum studies, visitors are viewed not as
passive "interpreters" or "re-presenters" trying to "grasp" the pre-defined
external world of the museum (cf. Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991). With
remarkable similarities to the Umwelt theory of Jakob von Uexküll,
now being intensively developed in the rapidly advancing field of biosemiotics,
Varela et al. summarize this model of cognition as follows:
If we are forced to admit that cognition cannot be properly understood without common sense, and that common sense is none other than our bodily and social history, then the inevitable conclusion is that knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent coorigination. (Varela et al. 1991: 150)
Applying this notion to the museum, Radley (1991: 74) writes that "the body is a key feature of the perception of museum objects...the lived body ...is the ground of our sensing of the resistance of the material world, its shape, size, and texture....It is not just in their spatial arrangements that artefacts are sensed but in their use. They are sensible in what they call out in us as we would touch, lift, wear, or stand upon them. To perceive a 'handle' I must not be just a thinker, but a handler with a hand that is substantial enough to grasp the cup, as it withstands my grasp." (cf. Veron and Levasseur 1989).
-an appreciation of the storied nature of thought and communication (including the qualitative interview process) (e.g., Bruner 1973, 1990; Sarbin 1986), which entails a thorough narratological component of any evaluation undertaken. Controlled, professional analysis of the stories visitors relate of their museum experiences and other leisure activities are a critical methodological step in revealing the embodied meanings museum exhibits have for different visitors and how they compare with competing leisure activities as well as non-leisure experiences. The use of both verbal and nonverbal narratives provides contrasting "views" of visitors' experiences and also gives access to those significant numbers of visitors whose cognitive style favors nonverbal sign systems (see below).
This new approach to visitor evaluation seeks to replace behaviorist accounts of remembering by taking into account the social and institutional contexts of memory processes, assuming that "it is not the primary function of all our talk to represent the world" (Lawrence 1991: 23). As Middleton and Edwards write (1990: 37), "people's accounts of past events, before they can be taken as data on the cognitive workings of memory, need to be examined as contextualised and variable productions that do pragmatic and rhetorical work..."
-recognition of the dialogic nature of self and meaning, which
focuses attention away from the individual and toward the significant others
who form a part of any act of consumption, including those of museum visits.
It is well known that the vast majority of museum visitors view their visit
as a social occasion, usually as a part of a longer social event, and yet
most of the visitor research has until recently focused on individuals
rather than social groups. Recently, a number of studies have begun to
pay attention to the social work which is done by museum visitors (see,
e.g., Hensel 1987; McManus 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991; Perin 1992; Silverman
1990). A useful model for the study of the dialogic construction of self
in museum settings is that of Bakhtin (cf. Peirce's notion of the semiotic
self), wherein:
I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou)....The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate....To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another....I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance). (Bakhtin 1984: 287) (cf. Zavala et al. 1993)
-a view of the production of meaning as cultural work, and of a museum display not as a window on the world but a cultural construction of reality. As Radley notes, "Collected artefacts are significant not only because curators say they are, or because they are in museums, but because they have done what we might call 'cultural work' for the person concerned. The object's significance lies in it symbolizing a tying together of cultural and personal pasts in a particular moment during a visit." (1991: 8). This view is particularly important in dealing with issues of multicultural audiences, as a growing number of publications have made clear (e.g., Bitgood and Thompson 1993; Karp and Levine 1991; Karp et al. 1992; McDonald and Alsford 1989).
-affirmation of the multi-functional nature of museums. While education‹seen as the transmission of knowledge and information‹has been the function most emphasized and evaluated, museums serve a number of equally important functions. They
-Recognition of the impact of different cognitive styles on the museum experience, where divergent styles are seen as equally valid approaches to knowledge and understanding in a museum setting (Umiker-Sebeok 1992). These cognitive styles influence how visitors move through the museum, how they choose where to stop, and how they interact with displays and with one another.
Given the differences in the models of thought and communication being used, the emerging paradigm for museum evaluation involves ethnographic or interpretive methods rather than, or in addition to surveys. Studies aim at understanding rather than measurement (Silverstone 1989: 147), at socializing rather than naturalizing meaning (cf. Porter 1991 re. gender constructions in museums). They focus on subjectivity and intersubjectivity, rather than objectivity. They study textuality and intertextuality, connotations and cultural codes, not just content. They assume that the visitor is active rather than passive, and that this activity involves bodily sensations and emotions, not just vision and thought. They avoid a rigid dualism between subject/object, and stress a phenomenological as opposed to a "representational" approach.
This "softer" school of evaluation, with its emphasis on discourse analysis, is still a minority view within museological circles, and, in contrast to the description above, in practice it is somehow diluted and does not provide the kind of theoretical challenges found in other areas of research (Lawrence 1991: 22). Referring to the dominant model of communication within a museum‹where a transmitter (the exhibitor) transmits ideas, through a medium (real things, in displays) to a receiver (a visitor, usually imagined as a single individual) with a feedback loop from receiver to transmitter‹, Hooper-Greenhill notes that
It is, in fact, extremely difficult today to find out what, if any, model of communication underpins the communicative efforts of museum professionals. I am not sure how far people are thinking about it in this way. However, I think it is fair to say that most museum workers are thinking in terms of the messages of the display, and thinking in terms of how messages may be transmitted effectively, which suggest that the [Cameron] model...is still in operation. (Hooper-Greenhill 1991: 57)