Would you agree that a museum experience begins the moment we come up with the idea of visiting a museum, not when we enter its doors? And that it ends when our memories of what we experienced fade, not when we step outside the museum building?
Such a perspective shift changes how we view museum visits and their impact. It elicits more profound interest in why people go to museums; how they spend their time there; or what they remember after their visit is over.
This insight, framed by John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking as The Interactive Experience Model, outlines the museum experience from a visitor’s perspective and emphasizes the interaction among three contexts: personal, social, and physical context.
The personal context is unique to each visitor. We all know how our knowledge, interests, beliefs, attitudes, motivations, and, in general, experiences, differ in comparison with those of other people. We also know that they may change in different periods of our lives. This implies our expectations may be fulfilled differently depending on who we are at the moment of our visit.
Our museum experience also depends on whether we visit the museum alone, or with other people. And if with others, is there another adult beside us, or are there children around? How knowledgeable and motivated is this person; how old are the children? How crowded is the museum? All the answers to these and other similar questions determine the social context of the visit.
And finally, it is self-evident that a museum is a physical setting. The entire “sense” of the building, the arrangement of exhibits, and the path we take through the collection – its physical context – it all influences how we will behave, what we will observe, and what we will remember.
These are precisely the reasons why we, at the Artivist Company, have designed the My Museum Experience digital solution as we have.
My Museum Experience starts from a brief and careful profiling of the visitor’s personal context – their interests, preferred perspectives and moods, and the time they have available. It takes into account the social context too, by enabling the experience to unfold as an individual or as a group one, and by adjusting the narrative style to the target audience. All these inputs are then aligned with the physical layout of the museum and its collection, to make the experience as natural, flowing, and diverse as possible.
At last, the visitor’s feedback collected at the end of the journey aims for the relevant information to be fed back into the system. The reason is simple: Continuous adjustment and improvement of this interactive museum experience is one interactive experience, too.
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