Museum Notes Rewind: Mud

In time for Mud Day, June 29, and 

for those who have been swamped by the recent rains in the Midwest, 

a reminder of the mud-luscious world we live in.

 

I have long loved mud. It is a messy and joyous medium full of great possibilities. As a child I molded “fruit” from the mud excavated from around the foundation of our newly built house. I built nests out of mud and dried grass and sat in the woods to watch which mud-grass nest design birds would choose. Hearing e.e. cummings’ phrase, “…when the world is the mud-luscious…” for the first time in college, the ooze and joy of mud play and the deep, dark pungent mud smell from childhood engulfed me. 

The scooping and sculpting, digging and dunking, concocting and cooking, mixing, making, and sitting in mud has long been part of childhood. Just as I remember sculpting with mud, a friend recalls a spring mud ritual in New Hampshire. When the snow was almost melted and the dirt-covered playground softened, eager boys hurried outside and scooped out snow to play marbles in the mud. Christine Maestri wrote in the Star Tribune some years back about her year old niece choosing mud to explore over an entire whole farm. Passing the barns, animals, garden, toys, grass, the toddler walked directly into the mud puddle and sat down where she stirred and squished the mud in her fingers and played with it for nearly half an hour. 

Childhood without mud play is sanitized in too many respects. This is more than adult nostalgia, a romanticized vision of childhood, and my personal fondness for mud. Given mud’s great learning value as fascinating content and inspiration for varied experiences, mud play has a limited presence in most children’s lives. Clay and sand are great, but mud is better. It is local, plentiful, versatile, and somewhat forbidden.

And Then There Was Mud

Mud is a world-making medium. The world was covered with primordial ooze, mud, at its very origins. Mud in its many forms, hot and eruptive has contoured the world; cool, slimy or thick, it has been a habitat for critters.

Just as mud was at the beginning of the world, it is also a universal medium for children to explore, discover, and use to shape their world. It is elemental, putting children in touch with the earth. The pressures of a small hand or the push and poke of even a tiny finger can sculpt mud and shape a world. Mud is not only local, it is also intensely seasonal.

Anything a-la-mud

Mud lends itself to cooking, painting, sculpting, building, and full body slathering. Children can create mudloaf, mud pies, mud lattes, and anything-a-la-mud in muffin tins, pie pans, ice cube trays, cake molds or cookie sheets. Do not forget the scrapers, pancake turners and spatulas; the stirrers, spoons, sticks, and brushes for mixing, mushing, spreading and stirring. In short, set out the whole kitchen. And the birthday candles. Leaves, seeds, and sticks make any mud creation better. Equip a mud patch with hand shovels and trowels for digging; buckets and tubs for filling; hoses, watering cans, and cups for adding water and making sure the mud is “just so.”

Mud play is inevitably child-directed. Few adults want to get in there and take over a mud activity. We do not need to teach children to investigate mud or how to do so. Investigations with mud start in many ways. Not surprisingly, children’ investigations of mud begin with touch, a finger, a toe, a hand, a foot, whatever the moment (and supervising adult) will allow. Deeper immersion will follow.

When I have watched children play with or in mud, they are either extremely intent and serious or are playful and exuberant. If intent, a child is alone in thought, observing closely and with great concentration as if measuring with her mind how much she must press this mud patty before the mud fills in. Or a child might watch how the mud drips form at the lip of the cup. A child might concentrate on a muddy finger and drag it across a stone, a bare arm, or a piece of paper and notice how mud paints. 

If joyous and spirited, children crow, cajole, and compete with one another about their mud related accomplishments. They might be stringing together mud-inspired rhymes in a sing-songy voice, serving mud lattes to imaginary friends, or applying face paint to scare others. Their imaginations transform mud to oobleck, to lava, to chocolate. Children join forces to sculpt mud worlds with castle outposts, great walls, towers and moats.

This is just the kind of lively participation in the world–physical, natural, social, sculptural, aesthetic–we so want children to enjoy. We seldom, if ever, see the same excited questions, deep absorption, extended discovery, and elaborate play narratives emerge from an exhibit on sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks with fixed specimens, labels and photos.

Learning from Mud

Attractive to all ages, the mud table at Discovery Hollow

Considering mud is so prevalent and versatile, so joyously accessible, there are surprisingly few opportunities for children to explore mud in museums, classroom, and camps. Occasionally a children’s museum or nature center will boldly embrace mud. Tamarack Nature Center added an enormous mud table in Discovery Hollow. Yet, one museum asked me to take “mud pies” out of the final draft of the exhibit master plan. Visions of muddy-fingered children disturbed board members.

Mud is quintessentially interdisciplinary. Is mud science, solids suspended in liquid? Is it art, a plastic medium with expressive qualities? Is it humanities, a universal building material providing shelter the world around? Yes. No. Mud is mud. 

While exploring mud is often unstructured and open-ended, it is also an entry point for children to explore and learn about big and sometimes complex ideas and often with a degree of authenticity that is valued.

Making bricks at the Santa Fe Children's Museum

Children are able to make adobe bricks at the Santa Fe Children's Museum. Outside, under the trees, children mix the soil (typically a sandy clay loam) and water, find the right proportion to get a stiff mix; fill and compact the wooden forms; and then remove the brick from the form and let the bricks dry in the sun. In the play and work of brick making are centuries of building knowledge, a feel for the native soil, the heft of wet and dry bricks. This can be repeated in other locales with wattle and daub methods using an underlying structure with twigs and sticks, mixing cut grass or straw into the mud, and ‘plastering’ it onto the structure beneath.

The clay house at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

As part of the summer 2012 exhibit, Dirt-O-rama: Intriguing Tales of the Underground at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, children worked with artists to create a clay house in front of the Arboretum Learning Center. Starting with an underlying straw bale structure, a coat of clay from the local brickworks was plastered over the spiral structure. Nearby, the Mud Kitchen was open for play on weekends.

Backyard bubbling mud at Pittsburgh Children's Museum

In addition to the indoor clay studio and the outdoor sandbox at Pittsburgh Children’s Museum are vats of beautiful, bubbling mud in the Backyard. Children can dip their hands and arms into the roiling ooze that suggests the Earth’s origins, feeling its temperature and consistency and sensing how it coats and clings to the skin. In Animated Earth by artist Steven Eisenhauer, children can add air to the mud vats. Turning the handles adds air pressure to change the surface, the size of the bubbles, and the music of the mud.

In an ode to the medium of clay, Denver Art Museum’s 2011 exhibit, Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World explored clay’s range and versatility as a mark of human interaction with the earth. The show features a great sweep of ceramic arts through human history and around the world, with antiquities and contemporary arts from the museum’s collection. Artists, asked to create specific works for the museum, stretched the possibilities of mud and ideas about clay. In the Mud Studio, children and adults explored clay as an inviting and forgiving sculptural medium that invites experimentation, permits mistakes, and allows reworking. 

Mud play doesn’t have to be outside or full body, although that is a terrific way to enjoy mud. Mud can be scooped onto a cookie sheet, fill up the sensory table, top off a plastic swimming pool, or be discovered in a mud puddle. It can turn an outdoor kitchen area into a mud kitchen. But I have to say that watching children at the Arboretum play in the mud, that the one having the most fun and on whom all eyes were directed was the boy sitting in, covered with, and lolling about the mud patch.  Oh, there is an International Mud Day. But I think any day can and should be a mud day.

Engaging with Matisse

Purple Robe and Anemones (1937)

There was no missing that a major Matisse exhibition was in the Twin Cities recently. For more than 3 months, every walk, bus ride, or freeway trip was in some way in view of a poster of Purple Robe and Anemones. Matisse, Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from February 23 to May 18, 2014.

Organized and circulated by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the exhibition spans 6 decades of Matisse’s career. It features 50 works of painting and sculpture, 30 prints, and the artist’s book, Jazz.  Most of the artworks came from the Cone Collection. Two Baltimore sisters–Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone–acquired an exceptional collection of 3,000 modern works (displayed in their apartments) including 500 works by Matisse.

With the exhibition’s announcement in April 2013 and its review on February 22, 2014 in the Star Tribune, visiting Matisse was on everyone’s A-list, especially this cold bleak Twin Cities winter stretching into April. The exhibition was high on my list as well. I have long loved Matisse’s vibrant patterns, broad blocks of color in unusual combinations, and emphatically flat compositions.

Drawing with scissors activity

Due to a busy couple of months for most of the exhibition’s run, I only made it to Matisse on a rainy Sunday afternoon in late April. When I did finally visit and with only 3 weeks before closing, I kept finding successive ways of engaging with Matisse and his work. Altogether, I toured the exhibition twice, listened in on a docent’s tour, eavesdropped on my husband’s audio guide, heard friends’ impressions, took photos, talked with a guard, observed families drawing with scissors, browsed in the museum shop, and visited a companion exhibit, Chasing Matisse, one floor up. This group of multiple experiences differs significantly from my typical pattern of a single visit to an exhibition as it does for most people, I think. While some of my encounters were serendipitous, I nevertheless enjoyed them and valued the intense and extensive engagement they all provided and they added up to.

Now, three weeks later, impressions of the exhibition are strong and surface pleasantly in both substantive and fleeting ways. I continue to make connections and solidify understandings grounded in Matisse. I'm following connections between comments and text, find a question, and recall a fragment from a painting. I am aware of feeling greater interest in the artist's smaller paintings than in his larger paintings, prints or sculptures and to some paintings like Interior, Flowers and Parakeets (1924) especially. At certain moments, I can conjure up the feeling of being back in the exhibition space and enjoying the sensation of a portrait dissolving into pure pattern.

Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899)

An image of the awkward hands folded gracelessly in the lap of The Yellow Dress (1929-1931) persists as well. This detail of the painting troubles me, insisting I explore the reason: its unfinished quality? its clumsiness? something else? I also hear a voice expressing how Matisse feels upon completing a composition, “Each picture, as I finish it, seems like the best thing I have ever done…and yet, after a while, I am not so sure.” It captures perfectly the highs and lows of finishing an exhibition, a master plan, a garden bed, or blog post.

In a daily way, patterns and colors of fabrics surrounding me vibrate more. I want to buy oranges because I remember their rich color in Still Life, Compote, Apples, and Oranges (1899). 

Durable Experiences

Through multiple exposures to an exhibition and its elements, we gather more pieces of information, draw on others’ perspectives, and anchor ideas in other knowledge we hold. The deeper, richer, possibly transformative experiences we hope exhibitions offer visitors rely on aligning a multitude of factors that are intended and serendipitous and that we can and can’t control.  But when exhibitions do manage this choreography of various entry points, complementary opportunities, and extended engagement, they create durable experiences that carry high personal value and lasting impact for visitors and resonate over time.

The character of durable experiences is sufficiently complex that it can't be collapsed into a quick list of criteria and folded into exhibition planning. However, identifying factors that might support durable experiences for visitors could help us understand how to increase the impact and value of experiences museums create. The four qualities below came through in my extended encounters with Matisse. Broadly speaking, they seem to support durability in ways that reflect the complexity of exhibition experiences and our growing understanding of learning in museums. 

• The Necessity of Time. Learning, making connections, or incubating ideas needs time. Even though I had an interest in and some familiarity with Matisse, I found I had little background for the focus of this exhibition. A second visit afforded me another opportunity to build up background knowledge. For instance, I needed to read some panels multiple times and on both visits to build the vocabulary for following the panels and consolidating ideas the exhibition covered. Also, it wasn’t until the end of my second visit that the interconnectedness of the artist’s work came into focus. His investigations of issues in sculpture informed his paintings; he drew models and then did paintings of them; in his prints Matisse explored formal concerns related to his sculpture.

• Conversation as Intensifier. Whether occurring within or outside an exhibit, conversation and dialogue serve as intensifiers, the way really is an intensifier that adds emotional context to a statement. Conversations introduce new perspectives, create openings, and activate possibilities for making connections and meaning in an exhibition. My friend told me Matisse’s creative process interested her most which I hadn’t thought about on my first visit. On my second visit, I looked for evidence of his creative process and glimpsed it in the 22 highlighted changes that Matisse made to Large Reclining Nude (1935). Nina’s interest alerted me to this propensity to return to and rework compositions, making his thinking about form, color, and line visible. Moreover, I saw this as documentation and how creative thinking might be made visible in an exhibition.

• Accumulated Experiences. Multiple, related, and complementary experiences sampled over the course of several weeks extended my engagement with Matisse to open up his remarkable body of work. When accessible, accumulated experiences can be sticky. It is as if each collected experience sets down another adhesive layer with the possibility of more, deeper, and lasting connections. An audio guide, a reading area, the MIA website’s Exhibition Preview, interactions with other visitors, text panels, and the artworks themselves are not unusual experiences for a museum to offer with an exhibition. Most visitors, however, typically accumulate only one or two of the many experiences available. A guard at the MIA told me about Chasing Matisse, the MIA’s companion exhibit one floor up. The reading area prominently located in a corner in the last gallery was well used on both visits. 

• Sustained Attention. Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science uses the term, sustained attention, in his recent interview with Museum2.0 blogger Nina Simon. Sustained attention, the several hours of attention we give a book or a movie, is one of the goals behind NYSCI’s experiment with a new medium for museums, an ebook. An ebook on the challenging subject of forensic science and the problem of false convictions and my extended engagement with Matisse are vastly different experiences. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, they help illustrate the importance of sustaining interest and attention in a topic, question, or issue to increase durability. Both point to the need for exhibitions–in fact for a substantial portion of museum work–to be compelling, have impact; and for the experience to leave the museum with the visitor, move into everyday lives, inform daily choices, and influence the future. 

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Experience Goals for Exhibitions

• Framing Experiences

Documentation: Looking Again

When I think of “the Image of the Child” I believe that if Reggio thinkers had not invented it, children’s museums would have had to. Stated so affirmatively, this compelling idea is central to children’s museums’ aspirations. It is the North Star for children’s museums to view all children as capable, competent, rich in ideas and potential; to be viewed as strong in spirit, active agents in their own learning.

I think of documentation in much the same way. A fascinating, complex process, it is a practice well suited to children’s museums, their settings and purpose.

Documentation, however, is not an immediately clear and obvious process. For instance, it is not showing your passport or drivers’ license to identify yourself. It is not timing-and-tracking visitors through an exhibit. Nor is it accountability and using an activity checklist to verify a child does or does not display a skill in an exhibit.

Documentation does, however, follow the child, looking at what she does in order to glimpse how children think and learn. Documentation captures and gives visibility to what is present in children’s activity, interests, ideas and thinking that we are not yet seeing or hearing.

Bringing Visibility to Children’s Potential

Moved by our curiosity and questions, documentation is shaped by focused observations, enriched by other perspectives, and fueled by new insights to further engage children’s potential.

We can describe documentation as a shared, iterative, and reflective process that involves gathering information and interpreting traces of children’s work and words. Unpacking this definition is not simple. Like Reggio philosophy in general, the parts are interconnected. But let me try.

•  Documentation is a process– noticing, following, and focusing on children’s conversations and questions, their drawings and movements. It’s a process fueled by a question about children’s interests, their thinking, what fascinates them, how they experience a phenomena and express their ideas.
•  It involves gathering information about children’s work and words. We observe children’s exploration of materials; listen in on their conversations; record their questions; follow their process and where it leads; notice how they represent their ideas; capture traces of their work and words. We take photos, write notes, video, and collect the work itself.
• Documentation is shared.  Rarely is documentation a solo endeavor. At its best, it involves multiple points of view in dialogue with each other. When photos have been sorted, notes transcribed, museum educators, designers, teachers, parents gather to look at what has been collected and to wonder, discuss, and ask questions among themselves about what this might mean. What thinking do others imagine was behind this gesture, the group’s interest in snails, the rhyming game?

• Iterative: Documentation is more a spiral than a straight line. It’s a process that revisits itself and the initiating question. Engaging around the documentation draws in new and varied perspectives on observations; distills them into fresh insights; and suggest possibilities about where to go next. Backing up to revisit something glossed over is not unusual and usually yields a new awareness. 

• Reflective: The exchange among these co-researchers invites thinking about a child’s choice of a word, use of a material, the fascination with the tree bark. Co-researchers wonder where else this exploration might go next. What is the child saying with her words, play, representations, or body language? What other possibilities are contained here? Through reflection we make meaning from what we have seen–and see again. 

•  The process continues through more iterative cycles, generating more questions, suggesting where this learning can go next, framing how we might relaunch an exploration. How might changes to this activity or component extend children’s explorations of bicycles? How can we learn more about children’s fascination with tape? How can we enrich the experiences and environments we create and facilitate for children? What new questions do we have?

Documentation and Children’s Museums

I am particularly struck by 4 ways in which documentation is a critically valuable tool for children’s museums to do their work better. First, documentation maintains the continuity, integrity, and richness of what’s happening in the space and in the moment. It preserves the flow of activity, cohesiveness of the context, and operative social and physical relationships for children and for adults.  More narrative than checklist, documentation does not extract a word or action from its context and isolate it. Documentation is alive–just as alive and lively as children and their thinking and learning.

Children’s museums are process-oriented in their values and practice. We value the pathways of doing and learning children engage in: what’s involved in getting to the top of the climber, trying varied strokes to squeegee paint on Plexi, placing one block on another just so, and approaching the giant ant with new confidence. Museums also rely on processes such as exhibit development and prototyping to create experiences and environments for children and to engage their potential. Especially noteworthy is that documentation occurs during the course of a project or development of an exhibit. In paralleling and intersecting with the child's process rather than being added at its conclusion, documentation easily informs what comes next in a project or how to improve an experience.

Third documentation is research. While it may not rely on control groups and random samples, it is a research approach grounded in our questions and observations of children and pursued with intention. It focuses on their engagement, experiences, and expressions in ways that advance our understanding of children. Currently, children’s museums draw on research and evidence about children’s thinking and learning as part of planning and evaluating experiences, programs, and environments. Through documentation, children’s museums are actively engaged in building a body of knowledge about children’s thinking, ideas, and learning in settings for play and exploration created for them. 

Finally, documentation makes more than just children’s learning and thinking transparent; it also brings clarity to our thinking and learning. Our knowledge building about children’s thinking and exploration parallels their research and knowledge building. Through documentation we become co-researchers and co-learners with children, and, for that matter, with parents and caregivers. This iterative process inspires more learning and reflection. Just as we are inspired to revisit our work, children who see their own work and thinking documented may be inspired to revisit their experiences and go deeper into their ideas.

Just as Reggio-inspired practice looks different in different communities and contexts, documentation is different in different settings: in Reggio and in the US; in schools and in museums; from one museum to another. Documentation may occur in the context of a classroom project, a project with a community partner, exploring children’s ideas about a topic or question, prototyping for a new exhibit, creating a pop-up experience, or because we have questions about children. In any case, documentation is a process that can and should occur in the everyday life of the museum and children.

While still new in museum settings, documentation is happening more and more. Do you have examples of documentation projects in museums? If so, let’s share them. I would love to hear from you.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Documentation: From Reggio Schools to US Museums
• Reggio Study Tour and the Children’s Museum Field
• Growing a Field-wide Research Agenda for Children’s Museums

Book Sculptures

 "There is no Frigate like a Book, 
to take us Lands away,..." 

(EMILY DICKINSON)

For the ingenuity, beauty, and delight books bring and the unexpected possibilities they offer in their many forms:

Books for hiding 

… for relaxing 

… for play 

… for the garden 

… for the garden wall 

… for fashionistas 

… for celebrating

… for contemplation 

Some of these creations I have come across on my walks and travels. Some have been sent to me by friends and colleagues. A few have shown up as design precedence for projects. All suggest possibilities.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Anywhere and Everywhere… Books

• Playing with…Paper

Framing Experiences

Held Within What Hung Open and Made to Lie Without Escape (Gregory Euclide)

Exhibitions are the primary way in which museums fulfill their educational purpose. Increasingly, more museums are developing exhibitions that provide experiences: senses-on, minds-on, and hands-on engagement with people, spaces, situations, and objects. Captivating, absorbing, and memorable for visitors, exhibition experiences leverage the object and material rich environments of museums and their social settings that engage interests and invite choice,  extending even to the impressions we take away and incorporate into our lives daily.

Experience-based exhibitions are familiar in science centers and children’s museums. Increasingly they have a presence in research- and collections-based museums as well. With greater attention to the public’s interests along with a growing body of research on learning in museums, museums are gradually shifting from a focus on subject matter and objects to a focus on visitors and to experiences that interpret content through the senses, emotions, physical engagement, and conversation rather than through text.

No simple definition categorically differentiates experience-based exhibitions from those that are not. They are, however, less likely to be flat, static, didactic, and predictable. As some of the following examples illustrate, exhibitions with a high experience quotient tend to insert the visitor into a moment or a different space, reducing the membrane between being outside and inside something intriguing. Experiences immerse visitors in phenomena, technologies, or stories; create a sense of the past in the present moment; take the visitor on a journey; challenge assumptions and perceptions. Often experience emerges from physical sensations of being up high, glimpsing dramatic views, sensing motion or being in motion, being swathed in light. Experiences have spirit or a spirit and often are memorable in their beauty.

Thermon Statom's Untitled at the Telfair

 • Light, glass, color, and shape create an airy, buoyant sensation in Therman Statom’s Untitled intriguing glass house installation at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah. The enclosures, openings, flow of spaces, and transparency of materials allow the visitor to see images overlap and float almost magically.

• Open House: If These Walls Could Talk at Minnesota History Museum uses a powerful organizer–a single St. Paul address and the lives of 50 families who lived there over 118 years–to draw visitors into exploring stories of new immigrants becoming citizens in a changing city.

• Temple statues at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena mounted on a long run of parallel pillars create a sense of being in a temple. By referencing their original location, this striking installation creates context, maintains relationships of scale, and interprets content through experience rather than, or in addition to, text.

• Perched at an unimaginably high position far above the Mississippi River flowing below is the Charles E., a full-size Mississippi River towboat in the Mississippi River gallery at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Visitors stepping up to the controls in the pilothouse, have a remarkably expansive view of the River and valley below.

Noah's Ark at the Skirball Cultural Center

• In the giant Anthill in Minnesota Children’s Museum’s Earth World, visitors enter the Anthill as their normal size compared to tiny ants covering the walls. Spiraling into the anthill, the size of the ants grows and grows until deep in the tunnels, a 6-year old is the size of the giant queen ant. 

• Extraordinary pairs of animals populating the massive boat in Noah’s Ark at the Skirball Cultural Center are captivating. Made of coiled rope, fly swatters, chopsticks, purses, and oilcans, these whimsical, full sized, approachable creatures invite play, wonder, and interaction. Both strange and recognizable, they add a modern twist to an ancient and familiar story. 

Countless more examples could be cited, from the simple delight of standing inside of a giant bubble; to being in the elements–water, rain, wind or fog; to feeling re-embodied by green screen technology; to feeling favored by the butterflies in a butterfly pavilion. As varied as they are, these exhibition experiences share similarities. They offer visitors an opportunity to immerse themselves in a distinct feeling of place or time, change their perspective, and connect through their senses and sensibilities. Very likely the teams for these exhibitions set out on their tasks somewhat differently, took some side trips along the way, and made choices that transformed the exhibitions themselves. 

Planning for Experiences

Developing exhibitions that are strong experientially requires a shift from exhibitions-as-usual. This is true regardless of the nature of the experience a museum is interested in offering for its visitors. Essential to a successful move is a museum backing its exhibition team in taking risks. In parallel, an exhibition team needs to modify perspectives, planning approaches and tools. This new territory requires new words, more verbs, shared definitions, expanded visual vocabularies, and more experiential strategies. Team members must find new space in which they can throw out wild guesses, become friendly provocateurs to colleagues, and look for new sources of design precedence. As a team, they must develop fluency in questions such as, “how could this be more of an experience?”

An experience is for someone, while an exhibition is about some thing. This change in perspective ripples in small and large ways through planning, throughout the exhibition itself, and even through the value visitors take away. Two significant shifts occur. First, the visitor moves to the center of planning. The focus becomes serving a person or people rather than an idea or abstract concepts. While subtle, an image of a person who is engaged and capable replaces a view of someone in need of help or waiting to be taught something. Clearly, every visitor brings abilities, interests, relationships, and a bank of life experiences to an exhibition. These are resources along with curiosity, feelings, and recollections that a team can build on in shaping experiences.

The Bubble Building (Dezeen)

Here is the second shift. With the visitor in mind, an exhibition’s value to the visitor is not just through the mind. Well-constructed experiences offer something that is not possible to learn through verbal messages and written text. Exhibitions that are strong as experience move from delivering content to engaging visitors in exploring, co-constructing, and consolidating ideas and information. The varied ways a visitor is present in an exhibition–physical, social and emotional as well as intellectual–are ways they actively engage with and connect experience ideas and concepts. Understanding that learning is a broader, more varied set of processes directed by the visitor plays a far greater role in planning an experience-based exhibition. Both thread through experience goals.

Experience Goals

Just as nothing categorically differentiates experience-based exhibitions from those that are not, experience goals are not dramatically different from typical exhibition goals. They are, however, different in some respects. Differences become apparent in looking into a working definition of experience goals, unpacking its parts, and highlighting how the parts lay the groundwork for robust exhibition experiences.

Experience goals focus on the visitors’ direct engagement with a set of varied opportunities present in the immediate environment, related to a chosen topic, story, or theme, and support the visitor in making multiple connections.

The visitor: The visitor is the subject of experience goals. As agents, visitors activate the experiences, setting in motion what is static without them. In bringing skills, dispositions, interests, previous experiences, questions, imagination, and their own perspectives into the exhibitions, they are co-constructors of experience. Visitors complete the experiences sketched out by the exhibition team.

• A team can reinforce the visitor’s critical role in shaping experiences by characterizing the visitor as driver of the experience. Goals might start with: Concerned citizens will…; Inquisitive children and families will…; or Art lovers will…

Direct engagement: Active verbs are called for in experience goals. Reflecting the first-person engagement of experience, verbs replace the relatively formulaic, noun-heavy, and passive language typical of education goals. Action verbs assure the visitor of having a role in shaping the experience. Doing rather than watching; engaging rather than understanding.

• Verbs expressing how visitors become co-creators of value include: activate, animate, appreciate, connect, direct, discover, empathize, explore, expand awareness, follow, immerse, interpret, invent, investigate, navigate, reflect on, stretch, transform.

A set of varied opportunities: Robust, actionable goals set the stage for wide-ranging experience strategies that support active engagement across many fronts: personalizing the experience, adjusting the pace, and following interests; initiating conversations or finding solitude; making choices or anticipating what might happen; using the body to measure distance and experience proportion.

• Varied opportunities engage multiple senses, domains, and modalities, venturing beyond the cognitive realm to embrace beauty, joy and delight, compassion, even reverence. Naturally, varied opportunities include full body experiences of being in a crowd, balancing, feeling the wind, or even feeling uncomfortable.

Present in the immediate environment:  Experience goals help concentrate exhibition planning on optimizing what visitors can engage with directly. Physical, social, emotional as well as cognitive engagement allows them to observe, move, talk, touch, construct, draw information, and make meaning.

• Immediate opportunities lay in navigating the site, spaces, structures and their features; glimpsing views; hearing sounds; moving around objects and changing positions; exploring materials; operating tools and mechanisms; completing tasks; being part of something bigger than one person can make happen. 

Related to a chosen topic, story, or theme: Experience goals frame 3-5 significant aspects of an exhibition topic or story casting them as roomy aspirations for the visitor. While stated broadly, experience goals give direction to (and are supported by) objectives that sharpen the focus on relevant forms and formats for engagement. These are, in turn, supported by experience strategies and design, messages, and text.

• A first crack at three goals might be: 
1) Investigate the arroyo as a place and an ecosystem; 
2) Engage in physical exploration and challenges across the site and its natural and built features: and 3) Reimagine the environment through creative expression.

Support the visitor in making multiple connections: Experience goals lay the groundwork for encouraging visitors to make connections they value. Connections, a basic way of capturing, if not defining, learning include connecting lived experiences with others’ stories; physical sensation with a natural phenomena; smaller ideas with a bigger concept; actions with consequences.

• Experience strategies for exhibitions are responsive to and supportive of how visitors make choices, explore ideas, and engage with others, follow possible paths, determine what might happen next.

Museums excel as places for experience; they are powerful sources for wholehearted engagement, for wondering, reflecting, connecting, and making meaning. Most museums ground some part of their exhibitions in experiences at least some of the time. Very likely, if asked about a powerful moment in a museum, visitors would share an experience: a view, a dramatic shift in perspective, a found connection with another person or a distant time. Experience goals help accomplish this important work in framing a team’s intentions and aspirations on behalf of its visitors, opening the possibility of extraordinary and durable experiences for visitors and for the museum.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Layering & Unlayering Exhibit Experiences

• Abundance

• Place Matters

• Experience Goals for Exhibitions