Man’s sense of space is closely related to his sense of self, which is an intimate transaction with his environment.
—Edward T. Hall, 19661
Mara is a physician in her late 40s who lives in the Washington, DC area. She is not an art person by profession but clearly, she is an art person by inclination. In so many ways her experience at the museum was quite different from the others we have met so far. Unlike Frances for example, Mara was very much involved in the content of the exhibition. She came not only to have the museum experience wash over her but to see a specific exhibition; in fact, she came in large part to see one particular painting. Although she visited the National Gallery as part of a social group—she began and ended her visit indicating that she was with her partner, Mara’s visit experience was fundamentally a solo one. In this way she was like Maria, but unlike Maria, whose goal was to explore the museum and counted on serendipity to help guide her experience, Mara arrived with a very specific goal—she was a fan of Edward Hopper. She knew his work, and was particularly interested in seeing one specific painting of his, which she did. I have categorized individuals like Mara as possessing a Professional/Hobbyists visit motivation; these individuals typically possess above-average knowledge of the museum’s content due to either their profession or avocation and they typically visit the museum in order to satisfy a specific goal or objective. In Mara’s case, it was to view a specific painting and a specific exhibition, but in other cases, the goal can be to get good close-up photographs of animals or, as is often the case for many museum professionals, to discover how others in the “business” are doing the job.
In talking with Mara, two self-aspects for this visit seemed to emerge from her interview. The first was very specific—“I’m a person who enjoys the art of Edward Hopper.” The second was more generic—“I’m someone who really enjoys and appreciates art and art museums.” Both of these self-aspects helped form not only her motivation for visiting the National Gallery of Art on this particular day, but it also created the lens through which Mara experienced the museum, as well as a frame of reference through which Mara created long-term meanings about her experience. In particular, Mara’s self-aspect as someone who likes Edward Hopper motivated her to extensively explore the exhibition; she read all of the label copy, listened to the audio guide, and watched the movie (not just once but twice). This goal provided Mara with what in psychology is called an “advance organizer” for her experience; it was a cognitive guide to all that she subsequently saw and did while in the museum.2
The Hopper exhibition itself also helped frame Mara’s experience. Although she entered and left the exhibition with preconceptions about what she did and did not like about Hopper which strongly influenced what she chose to view and think about, Mara discovered aspects of his art and life she had not known. In other words, her identity-related motivations and her prior knowledge and interests strongly shaped how she utilized the museum, but the realities of the museum—the specifics and quality of the exhibition and the interpretive materials—pushed back on her and in turn, modified what she saw and did there as well.
What the preceding interview reinforces is what most museum researchers already know—that the museum visitor experience is highly complex. The exact nature of any visitor experience will vary considerably, even among visitors who enter with the same general identity-related motivations. Understanding something about a person’s entering identity-related motivations, as well as their prior knowledge and interests, provides an extremely useful framework in which to unravel the complexities of the visitor experience. Although the experience of every visitor is unique, my research suggests that visitors with similar entering motivations, whether it be as an Explorer, Facilitator, Experience seeker, Professional/Hobbyist, or Recharger, are more likely to have similar inmuseum experiences than are individuals entering with a very different identity-related visit motivation. This motivation creates a basic “trajectory” for the visit, with each basic motivational category having a characteristic trajectory. Knowing something about these trajectories thus provides a large part of what we need to discover in order to really understand the museum visit experience.
This initial trajectory though is just that, a trajectory. Once in the museum, the individual can, and does head off in many directions. If we are to fully understand the visitor’s in- and post-museum experiences, we also need to know something about what the visitor sees and does during his or her visit and how this impacts the visitor’s trajectory. The best guide to these other influences is the Contextual Model of Learning.3 As previously described, an individual’s museum visit will be affected by a combination of contextually-specific events that can be organized within three basic areas, or what Dierking and I referred to as the Personal, Physical, and Socio-cultural Contexts. That said, not all parts of the in-museum experience seem to be equally important. I will briefly outline some of the key influences I think are crucial to our model of the museum visitor experience.4 The influences I will highlight are unlikely to be surprising, because these are the kinds of factors that most museum researchers, including myself, have spent years studying and analyzing. I will cover them only briefly here, not because they are of little importance but because others have already extensively written about them.
PERSONAL CONTEXT: PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND INTEREST
Considerable research over the past decade has confirmed that the personal interests and knowledge a visitor brings to the museum experience has a major influence on which exhibits, objects, or labels a visitor chooses to view and attend to.5 Museums are amazingly rich and stimulating environments. For those who have worked in museums for years, it’s difficult to appreciate just how overwhelming and novel these settings can be for most people. However, all visitors must develop coping strategies for sorting through the cognitive assault of the museum such as how to make good choices of what to attend to and what to ignore. Museum visitors like Mara have well-honed visit strategies. As visitors go, Professional/Hobbyists are among the most adept at navigating the museum. Visitors with this type of motivation typically rely heavily upon their prior visiting experience; they also rely on their extensive prior knowledge and interest in the subject matter to know how and where to focus their attention. All of these strategies allow Professional/Hobbyists to achieve an almost laser-like focus on what most appeals to them. But even the most naïve museum visitor applies some variation of this strategy, seeking that which is familiar. The need to feel secure in an environment drives all of us to seek that which is familiar; moderate novelty is quite stimulating while excessive novelty is quite disturbing.6 Consumer researchers have long been familiar with this phenomenon of the “cognitive lock-in” where the public regularly equates product familiarity with product superiority.7
A search for the familiar is in fact the dominant strategy for nearly all museum visitors. A visitor’s own prior knowledge and interests provide a frame of reference for them to make sense of what the museum contains. This is why the quip by a former science center director, “We teach people what they almost already know” is actually quite true.8 Just as all knowledge is constructed from prior knowledge, so too is decision-making in a novel setting driven by prior interests and experiences. No matter whether the visitor is an experienced Professional/Hobbyist visitor like Mara or a naïve first-time Experience seeker, much of what a visitor chooses to seek out and attend to while in the museum is driven by what they find most familiar and cognitively comfortable. It is important to note that this frequently results in the visitor attending to quite different ideas and objects in the museum from what the professionals who designed the museum exhibitions and programs intended the public to focus on.
Physical Context: Exhibits, Objects, Labels, and Programs
Well-designed exhibitions and programs—the careful use of color, texture, and lighting combined with skillfully written scripts and labels—are extremely successful at getting and focusing visitors’ attention. Without question, the realities of the museum, in particular the exhibits and objects visitors look at, the labels and guides they read and listen to, as well as the programs they watch and participate in, all influence their experience. To suggest otherwise would be unrealistic. Still, as this book suggests and in particular, the research that my colleagues Martin Storksdieck, Joe Heimlich, Kerry Bronnenkant, and I have conducted over the past decade attests to, these experiences do not unilaterally determine how visitors behave in museums, let alone what they ultimately learn and remember from the experience.9
As the interview with Mara demonstrates, part of what a visitor attends to is somewhat predictable based upon the design and layout of the museum-designed visitor experience. For example, Mara was quite aware of the fact that the Hopper exhibition was laid out chronologically and designed to show how Hopper’s art evolved and changed over time, and this structure clearly influenced her thinking and understanding of his art. Similarly, Mara picked up on a number of key ideas included in the interpretive text and film for the exhibition, for example, the fact that Hopper used his wife as his subject in nearly all of his works. As a consequence, Mara exited the exhibition knowing more about Hopper than when she entered. She described learning about changes in the style and content of Hopper’s paintings as well as important (to her) changes in his palette. Seemingly, she had not known about nor appreciated this as being important to understanding Hopper prior to entering the museum, despite feeling like she was quite knowledgeable about Hopper before her visit.
That said, it is fair to surmise that there were many other pieces of information about Hopper in the exhibition that did not emerge in my conversation with Mara—information that might have struck another visitor as important. Perhaps, this information did not seem salient to Mara, or she missed it, or she felt she already knew it and did not feel the necessity to describe it to me. In a similar way, there undoubtedly were many nuances of Hopper’s art that Mara missed. My interview with Mara shows just how selective is the exact experience of each visitor. Even a diligent museum visitor like Mara could not absorb everything a major exhibition such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston–National Gallery of Art Hopper exhibition was designed to provide. Although Mara entered the museum with a fairly high level of prior knowledge about his art, had a very high level of interest, and went through the exhibit about as thoroughly as could be expected, her recall was good but not excellent, even though only two weeks had elapsed since her visit. (Note: The full transcript of the interview is not presented. Mara provided considerably more detail about the exhibition than I’ve presented, but much less than what could have been gleaned from the exhibition.)10
Unquestionably, good exhibition, film, and program design matters to the museum visitor. For more than a quarter century, museum researchers have investigated museum experiences based on the assumption that an important measure of a well-designed exhibit is how well it both “attracts” and “holds” the attention of the visitor.11 With similar logic, museum researcher and evaluator Beverly Serrell has invested considerable effort measuring and comparing the amount of time visitors spend looking at exhibits within exhibitions. On average, most visitors only stop and attend to between 20% and 40% of the exhibit elements within an exhibition.12 And which exhibits a visitor ends up attending to is important. In a study conducted by Martin Storksdieck and myself, we were able to show that for many, though not all visitors, the quantity of what was learned in the museum was directly related to the quality of what was viewed. The number of “good exhibits” (as judged by an independent panel of experts) the visitor actually interacted with directly correlated with how much was learned.13 In other words, it does matter whether an exhibit is well-designed or not. It is important to note that, although in general, exhibit quality mattered, there were individuals for whom exhibit quality didn’t seem to matter at all. As I will describe in more detail later in this book, even this paradox can be at least partially explained by the museum visitor experience model. While Facilitators and Experience seekers are almost always strongly influenced by the quality and focus of an exhibition’s content and design, Professional/Hobbyists and Rechargers are much less so; Explorers fall somewhere in between.
Socio-cultural Context: Social Interactions and Cultural Background
As it has been described by Lynn Dierking and myself, as well as countless other investigators over the years, the visitor experience is strongly influenced by the within-museum social interactions of the visitor’s social group.14 If you spend any time watching visitors in museums, you can’t help but observe how social the visitor experience is. The overwhelming majority of museum visitors arrive as part of a social group. Since the museum environment itself is a socio-cultural one, all visitors, even those choosing to visit alone, find themselves quickly immersed in the socio-cultural milieu of other visitors, museum staff, and volunteers. Look even closer and you realize that much of the social interaction is a way for visitors to connect and find meaning. As discussed earlier, not all of the social interaction is content-focused. For example, some of it involves bonding between individuals or, for example, within families, behavior management such as checking to see if children are hungry or need to use the restroom. Still, much of the social behavior that goes on in museums is focused on discussing and sharing information about the content of the museum. These conversations can ultimately have more impact on a visitor’s memory of the experience than the objects and labels themselves. This socio-cultural mediation, either direct or indirect, plays a critical role in personalizing the visit experience for visitors, facilitating their efforts to learn and find meaning from museums. Even Mara, who said she yearned to be by herself during her visit to the Hopper exhibit, periodically interacted with her partner over the course of the visit; for example, they watched the film together. Probably even more importantly for Mara, she talked about the exhibition and her visit experience with both her partner and her parents both prior to arriving at the museum and in the hours and days subsequent to her visit. All of these interactions helped to frame what Mara ultimately recalled as her “visit” experience. Accordingly, it has been argued that learning is a special type of social behavior and museum experiences represent a special kind of socio-cultural learning.15 Much as what a visitor sees and does while in the museum are intertwined throughout a visitor’s experiential narrative of a visit, so too are the visitor’s social experiences.
Finally, the socio-cultural context both defines who we perceive ourselves to be, as well as how we perceive the world we inhabit. In a very real sense, the world in which each of us lives has meaning because of the shared experiences, beliefs, customs, and values of the groups that inhabit it with us. This collection of shared beliefs and customs is what we have come to call “culture.”16 Social psychologists Eugene Matusov and Barbara Rogoff have argued that
the diversity of goals of different communities necessitates defining development in terms of progress toward more responsible participation in specific communities of practice rather than assuming that development is a generic process independent of the goals and institutions of the communities in which an individual develops.17
Visitors who possess different cultural backgrounds and experiences are not only likely to utilize the same museum spaces, exhibitions, and programs in different ways, but they are almost certain to make very different meanings from what superficially might appear to be similar museum visitor experiences.
TRAJECTORIES AND STOCHASTIC MODELS
We want to believe that the visitor experience in a setting like a museum should depend upon a range of describable and manageable factors. As outlined in the previous chapter, we like to think of humans as rational and predictable creatures, and more to the point, we envision our creations like the museum as logical and predictable places. However, as Martin Storksdieck and I discovered when studying the behavior and learning of science center visitors, there were a whole suite of often unpredictable and unexpected factors that influenced visitors. We concluded that any model of the visitor experience would have to more closely resemble a stochastic model than a linear, logic model.18 A stochastic model assumes that “initial states”—for example, entering identity-related motivations and an individual’s prior knowledge, interest, museum experience, and social arrangement—are important determinants of a visitor’s behavior and learning. However, these are influenced over time through interactions with both predictable and unpredictable events. The collective interactions, rather than just the initial state, determine the ultimate outcomes. In addition, random events such as large crowds, a sick or hungry child, or the sudden appearance of a knowledgeable and engaging staff member, can influence not only which factors come into play as important, but also modulate the relative amplitude of impact those factors have on learning. Stochastic factors influence both the quality and quantity of experiences that results.
We can envision virtually every visitor entering the museum with a generalized pre-museum visit experience “trajectory.” That trajectory is determined first and foremost by the visitor’s entering identity-related motivation, which is strongly influenced by that individual’s prior knowledge and interests. In turn, this is influenced by the companions with whom they choose to visit the museum; these companions also collectively shape their perceptions of what specific leisure-related attributes the museum is likely to afford them that day. In general then, these entering conditions collectively predispose the visitor to interact with the setting in relatively predictable ways. However, once in the setting, the visitor is affected by a whole series of additional factors, some of which are under the control of the institution (mediation provided by trained staff, orientation brochures and signage, good and bad exhibits, and the nature of interpretation tools such as labels and audio guides) and some of which are not (social interactions within the visitor’s own group and interactions with other visitors outside of his or her own group). All of these factors are potentially influenced by other random events, such as whether there’s an interactive exhibit of particular interest to the visitor that happens to malfunction; or at the exact moment a visitor arrives at an important explanatory label, a crowd of visitors standing in front of it causes the visitor to skip the label; or a child or spouse suddenly needs to go to the restroom; or a volunteer “randomly” selects the visitor to be part of a demonstration; or a text panel includes information the visitor just happened to have read about the previous day; or a sudden flash of bright light over one end of an exhibition hall catches the visitor’s attention just as he or she enters a gallery and causes him or her to move in a direction opposite to the flow pattern intended by the designers. All of these events happen every day in museums around the world. What is predictable is that events like this will and do happen, what is not predictable is when they will happen and to whom. The point is that if and when random things like this occur, they influence the trajectory of the visitor’s museum experience in both small and at times dramatic ways. The nature of the visitor experience depends on events the museum can design for and count on happening, and upon random events beyond the control of the museum.
For many visitors, particularly experienced visitors like Mara (above) and Frances (previous chapter), their trajectory through the museum is relatively straight and true. They head into the experience with one or more goals and they are sufficiently single-minded in their pursuit of that goal. This is particularly true for individuals with Professional/Hobbyist motivations like Mara and individuals with Recharger motivations like Frances. These are typically experienced museum visitors, regular visitors to one specific institution, or at the very least, regular visitors to similar institutions. Armed with a goal and knowledge of how to navigate around potential obstacles to their goal, the likelihood of perturbation diminishes and visitors with these motivations often move through the museum with a smooth and remarkably predictable trajectory. But this is not the case for all visitors.
DEFLECTED TRAJECTORIES
The complexity of the museum environment, coupled with the uniqueness of each visitor, almost guarantees that the visitor experience will never be totally predictable for all visitors. For many visitors, particularly those with the entering motivations of Explorers, Experience seekers, and Facilitators, the “straight as an arrow” type of visit trajectory is the exception rather than the rule. Visitors enacting the roles of Explorers, Experience seekers, and Facilitators are generally less task-oriented than are those enacting Professional/Hobbyist and Recharger roles. The former groups of visitors are likely to meander through the museum, waiting for something to attract their attention or interest. Once it does, that thing or person will then direct much of their experience. Although the specifics of what the visitor focuses upon are determined by the many possibilities in the museum, the reference point remains fixed by the person’s entering self-aspects. The following is an excerpt from a visitor, I’ll call her Sara, who entered the museum as an Explorer and because of unforeseen events, slid briefly into the Professional/Hobbyist role before returning to her more typical Explorer role.
Sara is a white female in her mid 30s. She has a high school diploma and attended but did not graduate from community college. At the time of this interview, she was working as a customer service representative for a bottled water company in Los Angeles. Sara was one of the individuals interviewed as part of the major National Science Foundation-funded California Science Center study previously described. She visited the Science Center in the spring with her three children who were 9-, 4-, and 1-years-old at the time. Despite being a “family visitor” Sara was definitely operating with an Explorer visit motivation. During her Science Center visit, she alternated between leading the visit and following her children, though there were periods of time when she and the children moved through the exhibition quite independently. This post-visit interview was conducted in Sara’s home approximately two years after the visit. If you pay attention to how Sara initially describes her Science Center visit, it is clear that her self-aspects revolve primarily around her desire to satisfy her own interests and curiosities as is typical of Explorers. However, Sara also reveals that a serendipitous event pushed her into a more focused, content-oriented motivation more typical of a Professional/Hobbyist. It is worth noting that despite being a “family” visitor, Sara does not spend much time enacting a Facilitator motivation. Although she displays a continuous concern for her children and their well-being, they do not primarily motivate her behavior, or her memories of the experience as they would for someone who was enacting a true Facilitator motivation.
As Sara revealed details of her life history, it became increasingly clear why she was so fascinated with prenatal development. This interview reveals how one particular event, a conversation overheard in a stairway, can dramatically intersect with a person’s identity-related needs and interests so as to determine their museum visit experience. Sara did not know about this exhibit before visiting the Science Center, but once she discovered it, her own personal needs and interests caused her to spend considerable time there. She may have stumbled upon it anyway but maybe not, as the exhibit is located in a back corner of the exhibition. Or perhaps, she would have discovered it but only at the point when her children were tired and ready to leave, necessitating a hasty and incomplete exploration of the exhibit. Because of this unanticipated knowledge of the exhibit’s existence, the trajectory of her visit was dramatically influenced. Sara made it clear that her reasons for spending time at this exhibit were quite personal, although at some point she indicated that she might want to share this information with others, for example, with her daughter. The details of Sara’s experience are not typical; what is typical for many museum visitors is that the topics most vigorously pursued during a visit are usually those about which the visitor already knows something. Many museum professionals assume that visitors will be most attracted to unknown topics. As discussed above, the exhibits most visitors find most appealing are those for which they already possess a strong interest in and knowledge about prior to their visit. As was the case for Sara, despite being well-read on the subject of prenatal development, she felt that her Science Center experience had significantly enhanced her knowledge and understanding of this subject. The authentic objects seemed to help crystallize a synthesizing process of meaning-making and perceived understanding.
As we continued to question Sara about her museum visit, she revealed considerable insights into how identity-related visit motivations drive museum visitor experiences. Although there was clearly some tension between Sara’s desire to satisfy her impromptu Professional/Hobbyist motivations (in the Human Miracle exhibit) and her Facilitator-like parental obligations to her young children, her answers reveal that these were not the motivations that primarily drove her visit experience. The self-aspects she uses indicate that she perceives herself as a basically curious and interested person, less interested in any one topic or subject, and more interested in learning and discovery in general. Sara expressed self-aspects that typically go along with individuals who assume an Explorer visit-motivation, and overall her in-museum behaviors reflected that motivational bias.
A: |
I wanted to stay there longer [Human Miracle exhibit], but I didn’t because my children just thought it was a spooky place to be in. [Note: This part of the exhibition is quite enclosed and dark with the different-aged fetuses arranged sequentially in back-lit cases.] |
Q: |
How did you decide between what you wanted to see and what they wanted to see? |
A: |
If it was pretty interesting I would just stick it out and just tell my children you guys can go in front of me or meet me in the corner and walk real slow and I’d catch up. I just tried to catch on to as much as I could and my children, they pretty much weren’t interested in too much. I love to find out about things and always try to stretch my understanding of how stuff works and why things are the way they are. |
For many visitors, like Sara, Maria, and Elmira, the museum represents a space for generalized exploration and discovery rather than a place for satisfying a specific outcome. Citing statistics that most visitors only stop at a small percentage of exhibits within an exhibition or museum, Jay Rounds argues that this doesn’t represent some kind of deficiency on the part of visitors, but an intelligent and effective strategy for piquing and satisfying curiosity.19 Using ideas derived from optimal foraging theory in ecology, Rounds hypothesized that curiosity-driven visitors would seek to maximize what he called the “Total Interest Value” of their museum visit—finding and focusing attention only on those exhibit elements they deem to have the highest interest value and the lowest search costs. According to Rounds, this “selective use of exhibit elements results in greater achievement of their own goals than would be gained by using the exhibition comprehensively.”20 Thus, the experience for exploring visitors is generally but not specifically predictable; so much depends upon what the visitor encounters that resonates with his or her various needs and interests. We can characterize these visitors as having “wobble” in their visitor experience trajectory; there’s a generalized directionality to their museum experiences but the specifics are likely to be variable and idiosyncratic.
Given that these entering identity-related motivations are NOT qualities of the individual, but temporary roles that visitors enact to fit the specific needs and leisure realities of the moment, one would expect that many visitors would enter with one set of motivations and exit with another. This certainly would have been my assumption, and in fact, it was when I first began this line of research a decade ago. Much to my surprise, the entering trajectories of most visitors, as defined by their identity-related motivations, seem remarkably stable over the course of a visit. That is not to say that alternative motivations don’t intercede as exemplified by Sara’s discovery of the human development exhibit. But as demonstrated by Sara, it appears that the motivational goals visitors enter with are also typically the goals they exit with.
As a thought experiment conducted early in my process of creating this model, I attempted to categorize the motivational focus of one of my own museum visits. While in Los Angeles during one of my extended research visits, I visited a museum as part of a family social experience. My brother and sister-in-law live in Los Angeles, and as it happened during this research visit, I often stayed with them to keep down the costs of staying for weeks while conducting my research. On this particular weekend, it was decided that we should do something together and the idea came up to visit a new exhibition that had just opened. It’s an important bit of background information to know that my brother rarely goes to museums while my sister-in-law really enjoys visiting museums. This weekend outing, then, was somewhat of a conspiracy between me and my sister-in-law to get my brother to go to a museum. The “bait” was a special exhibition which happened to be on a topic that we both felt my brother would find interesting. We used my presence as an excuse to go (since of course, everyone knew I liked museums). The ploy worked and we went to the museum. Two days later, as I was flying back home to Annapolis, I realized that I could use this family experience as a thought experiment. I wrote down, in approximately one-minute intervals, my entire museum experience as best as I could recall, from the moment we left the house to the moment we got to our next destination. I then attempted to categorize, according to my five identity-related motivations, which identity I was enacting at each moment of my visit. The results were quite revealing. Over the course of the visit, I had actually assumed each of the five motivational types, but overall, my entering motivational type—Explorer—kept resurfacing. Despite slipping into each type occasionally, for example, playing Facilitator to make sure my brother or sister-in-law were happy, or Experience seeker to check out the iconic exhibit at the museum, or Recharger when finding a lovely place to sit and enjoy the space while my brother and sister-in-law investigated the gift shop, or Professional/Hobbyist to admire a design decision, I predominantly stayed in Explorer mode. By my calculation, I spent approximately two-thirds of my time in Explorer mode during that museum visit experience. These surprising results have been borne out time and again as my colleagues and I have talked to other visitors.21
Another fact that emerges from my inquiries of visitors is that even when events conspire to undermine a visitor’s identity-related goals, they are amazingly persistent and resilient in their efforts to make the space work for them. What follows is an interview with Hanna, a woman in her late 30s who visited the High Desert Museum, a history and nature museum located in Bend, Oregon, with a friend, her friend’s son, and her own two children. As will become immediately clear, Hanna entered the Museum with a Facilitator visit motivation. However, based upon past experiences at the Museum, she also likes to see and learn from the exhibitions and programs and because of her background (she’s a biologist), she has considerable relevant prior experience and knowledge.
Clearly this was a very frustrating experience for Hanna, everything seemed to go wrong—her son misbehaved and didn’t seem particularly excited by the visit, and she didn’t get a chance to see her favorite exhibits—still she indicates that overall it was a good visit. She primarily attributes the fact that the museum visit didn’t totally fulfill her expectations, rating the experience a 4 out of 7, to causes other than the museum itself. The experiences of both Hanna and Sara reveal, despite being different, that even with powerful and unanticipated museum “realities,” a visitor’s entering identity-related motivational narrative is very difficult to derail. Sara accommodated the realities of the museum she encountered seamlessly into her entering identity-related motivations; the result was a visitor experience that was fundamentally what one would expect from an Explorer—idiosyncratic and exhibit content-driven. Hanna, despite the poor behavior of her son and her friend’s son conspiring to undermine a lovely family day at the museum, persisted in interpreting the experience as such; she was a good parent who exposed her children and her friend’s child to the benefits of a museum visit. That the behavior of her child created significant dissonance for her and threatened to completely deflect her visit trajectory, did not seem to change her self-concept or sense of satisfaction with the experience—“I try to keep my expectations pretty low when I go anywhere with children.” Sara dealt with these challenges by essentially encasing these unexpected events in “lowered expectations” and thus sealing it off from her larger “good parent” narrative. Such are the wonders and complexities of the museum visitor experience!
I have provided just a few examples of the museum visitor experience for which I have demonstrated how it’s possible to begin to model the museum visitor experience. However, as noted earlier in the chapter, it will never be possible to completely and specifically model this experience. This is partially due to the stochastic nature of the visitor experience, but more than anything, it is due to the inherently complex and highly personal nature of each human’s meaning-making. Still, I would make the case that this view of the museum visitor experience is beginning to provide a degree of understanding that has not been possible. To see how it all becomes a whole and something we can confidently describe and predict, we must again move outside the confines of the museum. To understand the museum visitor experience, we must now move to that abstract realm where the museum and visitor come together over the course of days, weeks, months, and years—the “museum visitor experience” that is constructed within the mind of the visitor and expressed in the form of visitor satisfaction and memories.