The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
The impetus for this book actually goes back to the early years of my career in the 1970s when I believed that it should be possible to develop an empirically based model of the museum visitor experience. For more than thirty years, I have been working towards that goal, trying to understand why people go to museums, what they do once inside the museum, and finally, what meanings people make from their museum visitor experiences. In many ways, this book represents the product of all these many years of research and thinking. Although the model I propose in this book falls just short of that dream of a fully empirical model, it comes close.
As described first in The Museum Experience1 and then again in Learning from Museums,2 both co-authored with Lynn Dierking, I made the case that the museum visitor experience is a complex mix of multiple factors. In these previous books, the depth of my understanding limited me to descriptions of the museum visitor experience, albeit using increasingly sophisticated descriptions. In this book, I present not just a descriptive model of the museum visitor experience, but also a predictive model. The breakthrough came in the last six years when I realized that the key to understanding the museum visitor experience was the construct of identity. As I discovered, this single broad thread runs through all facets of the museum visitor experience. Each of us possesses many identities which we use to support our interactions with the world, including a museum visit. An individual’s identity-related needs motivate him or her to visit a museum and provide an overarching framework for that visit experience. However, the social and physical realities an individual encounters while in the museum are not insignificant. Although identity-related needs and interests primarily direct the individual’s museum visit experiences, the museum itself is not passive. The realities of the museum also play a role in bending and shaping the individual’s museum visit experience. But once away from the museum, the individual’s identity-related needs once again hold sway, forming a prism through which all experiences are viewed. The challenge was how to weave all these threads together into a single theoretically consistent and empirically supportable model.
In writing this book I have tried to bring together several major strands of knowledge, in particular, my deep understanding of museum visitor studies and a comprehensive awareness of research in the leisure sciences. I have also brought to bear my understanding of psychology, neurobiology, and marketing research. I have tried to intertwine these basic strands into a single, unified model that attempts to describe as well as predict the visitor experience. It is a model that takes into consideration how long-term memories and meanings are constructed from a visit to a museum. It is a model that postulates that a museum visit itself is strongly shaped by the expectations an individual develops prior to a visit, based upon his or her own identity-related need, as well as by the expectations and views of the larger socio-cultural context. It is a model that describes how the individual’s larger socio-cultural context is, in a very real way, strongly shaped by the collective personal experiences of every person who has ever visited a museum, including the individual. Although I present the model linearly, as the medium of a book dictates, beginning with the large-scale context of twenty-first century leisure and concluding at the level of personal memories, it’s important to keep in mind that the model could just as easily be run in reverse, starting from a person’s memories. And of course, each link in the model has numerous feedback loops to each of the other links.
My goal in writing this book, more than anything, is to help change the quality of how museums understand and support the public’s museum visitor experiences. I sincerely believe that this model has the potential to permit museums to proactively manage the museum visitor experience in new and ultimately, better ways. Specifically, the model I propose encourages museums to approach interacting with visitors in more customized and tightly tailored ways to meet the specific needs of individual visitors; it is not about types of visitors, but the types of visitor needs. Basing practice on this new model would also require profound changes in current museum practice—developing exhibits and programs designed to accommodate multiple outcomes and visitor goals. Finally, I believe that using the model would also dramatically change how museums define and measure their impact; bringing institutional missions, practices, and assessments more in-line with the actual public values and outcomes. I appreciate that these are bold assertions. Ultimately, each reader will need to decide if they accept either the model or my assertions of its implications.
Although the model I propose is primarily based upon research that I have conducted in the U.S., results from other countries, in particular the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Colombia support my conclusions. Whenever possible, I have included data from other countries though it’s clear that my primary data comes from the U.S. Despite this regional bias, I think the basic framework of my model is likely to be robust in other cultural contexts. That said, it remains for others to determine if the specific motivational categories of visitor I have defined are the same in other countries and situations. Also, despite making the case that the variables of gender, race/ethnicity, social class, and even age provide relatively little explanatory power, I do not want to suggest that these variables have no influence on the visitor experience. They would almost certainly be important in museums that focus specifically on identity-related issues of race/ethnicity, gender, or nationality (for example, the numerous race/ethnicity museums such as the many African American museums and the Japanese American National Museum; gender-focused museums such as the Women’s Museum; nationality and ethnicity focused museums such as the American History Museum and the National Museum of Australia or Te Papa). That said, I do not explicitly deal with these variables or these types of museums in this book.
Clearly, the tight focus in this book is on museums. However, I believe that the ideas presented here could be applied to a wide range of other leisure settings and contexts. Although similar ideas have been applied to recreation and leisure settings for years, they have always stopped short of the model I propose. Leisure motivation models now consider the reasons for why the public participates in leisure activities, but they have not pushed beyond this by making predictions about visitor outcomes beyond satisfaction.
Organizationally, I have divided the book into two major sections. The first seven chapters are grouped together into a theory section. I have tried to provide a readable and thorough review of the important theoretical ideas that underlie the model. I am hopeful that others will find the logic behind this model as compelling as I do. The final four chapters form a practice section. Inevitably, some museum practitioners may feel that the practice section does not go far enough in providing the details necessary to fully implement the possibilities suggested by this new model. If this is the case, I apologize but encourage patience as the model is newly minted. In time, I am confident that good examples of practice will emerge. At present, I have tried to suggest how I think the model could be applied.
As is always the case, the ideas in this book do not derive exclusively from my own thoughts. I am particularly grateful to a number of individuals who helped me think about these issues over the past several years—some explicitly, some through their writings, and some just through their inspiration. I am particularly grateful to my long-time Institute for Learning Institute research colleagues Martin Storksdieck, Joe Heimlich, Kerry Bronnenkant, Jessica Luke, Jill Stein, and Nettie Witgert; also my Australian colleague Jan Packer. My colleagues at the California Science Center, in particular David Bibas, Jeffery Rudolph, Diane Perlov, and my dear departed friend Dave Combs provided support and input to my investigations at the Science Center over many years. I am also indebted to my zoo and aquarium colleagues Cynthia Vernon, Jackie Ogden, Kathy Wagner, Carol Saunders, Bruce Carr, and Eric Reinhart who helped encourage, critique, and facilitate my major investigations of zoos and aquariums. I also want to acknowledge my Colombian colleagues Carlos Soto, Sigrid Falla, Claudia Aguirre and Fanny Angulo, as well as the thirteen graduate students from the Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin who helped me validate these ideas within a Latin American context. I wish to thank my Oregon State University colleague Dr. Olga Rowe and my graduate research assistants Nancy Staus and Lyn Riverstone for their assistance with interviews and data collection and also my current free-choice learning graduate students. I am particularly grateful to Michele Crowl and Katie Gillespie who have made important contributions to my research and thinking.
I am particularly indebted to the U.S. National Science Foundation for their continuing support of my research; much of this work could not have happened without NSF funding. Accordingly, I want to thank all of the anonymous reviewers who encouraged the NSF to fund my projects and to the program officers like Barry Van Demon, Sylvia James, David Ucko, and Barbara Butler who guided my efforts for the past many years.
I am particularly appreciative of the comments provided by the individuals who reviewed a preliminary version of this book—two of whom I know, two of whom were anonymous. Thanks to all four individuals, but a special thanks to Roy Ballantyne and to Jay Rounds, both of whom I recommended as reviewers. Not only has their thinking and writings inspired me over the years, I knew they would be totally, and if necessary, brutally honest in their reviews; they did not disappoint. Jay, in particular, deserves a very special thank-you as his comments and suggestions were fundamental to the current version of the model and its presentation in this book. Jay, if it’s still not quite right, it’s not your fault!
I also thank my publisher Mitch Allen for believing in me and encouraging me to write this book. Also my thanks to Patrice Titterington for her editing efforts that helped make this book readable and to Lisa Devenish for overseeing design, layout, and production.
Finally, as ever, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my intellectual and emotional partner Lynn Dierking. Her continued support in all ways has allowed me to produce this book and it is to her that I dedicate this volume.