Exhibitions about pets

This question from Susan Sedgwick, Historic Houses Trust: Hi Lynda, thank for taking the time to talk with me today. As I mentioned, the Historic Houses Trust is developing an exhibition Tails of the city: Sydney's passion for pets on the history of Sydneysiders and their pets to be shown at the Museum of Sydney from 13 December 2008 until 22 March 2009. Consequently I would be very interested to view any 'Dogs' audience research material that you can share and which might be relevant.

Hi Susan – we did some forward planning research several years ago now for a potential exhibition called It's a dog's life. We found that this topic really polarised audiences – you're either a dog person or you're not. The topic had very strong appeal for dog lovers and hopeful dog owners; then there are those who actively don't like dogs and there are others who are ambivalent. Parents also feared that an exhibition like this would fuel their childrens' interest, increasing pressure to get a dog when they don't understand the big commitment to owning one. Those that were interested had many questions and topic suggestions:

• What do dogs see?
  
• What can they hear?
  
• How does their sense of smell work?
  
• Explain their strange habits
  
• Explore their intelligence and psychology – how do their 'minds' work?
  
• Life from a dog's point of view
  
• See what they're capable of (working dogs, tricks, behaviour)
  

Ultimately, for the dog lovers they wanted to explore the human-dog relationship. They expected the overall mood of the exhibition to be light-hearted and humorous as dogs are quite amusing. However, when compared with the other topics we tested (such as ants, deep ocean, bog people) they felt it could give them nothing new, they are very familiar so what could the exhibition bring that was new? Finally, they thought the best thing about dogs is live dogs, so what else could make it exciting?

Susan, you have an interesting conundrum and much food for thought – it is a person's ingoing attitudes to pets that will largely determine their reactions to the exhibition. Personally, I dislike pets intensely and couldn't think of a more boring topic for an exhibition – but then I'm not your target audience (sorry all you pet lovers out there...)! By the way, the National Archives of Australia did a travelling exhibition about working animals called It's a Dog's Life! Animals in the Public Service and they may have done some evaluation on that – don't know who to contact there anymore though.

Challenging topics

I got this request via the VSG discussion list: Dear Colleagues, We have just put up the Hard Rain exhibition in the zoo. The exhibition is a United Nations Environment Programme partnered exhibition that graphically illustrates our collision with nature and defines the major environmental issues of the 21^st Century. Some of the images may be disturbing for our visitors and this is quite a departure for zoo culture. We really feel we should do some audience research on this and wondered if anyone in VSG could recommend a tried and trusted methodology, other than questionnaires which we don't want to do. We'd prefer unobtrusive observations and recording reactions, including conversations. But how to reliably classify and analyse? Many thanks, Maggie Esson.

Hi Maggie and congrats on what looks like an interesting exhibition. You're not alone in putting up controversial issues in an exhibition and certainly our research for the Exhibitions as Contested Sites project has found that visitors want to engage with museums on difficult and controversial topics. I don't think you should discount doing a survey/questionnaire – we have done several for quite disturbing exhibitions, for example death – the last taboo and Body Art, and got fantastic and thoughtful responses, and visitors were glad to be asked. For the Body Art exhibition we also had a large comments book where visitors posted their reactions which worked really well and we got some stunning answers. The power of this, of course, is that visitors also responded to others' comments.

As to recording and analysing conversations there is a whole book dedicated to this very subject (Leinhardt, Crowley and Knutson, 2002). I did a review of this in Chapter 3 of my thesis which can be found on my wiki (p.104-107), along with a section on observations (p.107-110). There has been some work using video-capture technology recording visitors' reactions to an exhibition on slavery which were subsequently published on YouTube, as well as in the exhibition. We had a discussion about this a long time ago on my blog which has various links to the project.

Good luck Maggie. My advice is to not worry at all about asking visitors to respond –you'll find, not only that they really want to do so, but that their responses will amaze and inspire.

Locals visiting museums

After my excellent lunch the other day with Rob and Gillian, I got inspired (or was that instructed!) by Rob to re-visit his 2005 paper The "Museum Constant": One-third plus or minus a bit (Visitor Studies Today!, 8/2, pp1, 4-7). Rob reports on an analysis of museum visiting data collected over a 13 year period with Australians asking about their leisure activities, demographic profile and personality/self-description items. Generally it was found that around 35% of the Sydney population visit museums, with the interest in museums more noticeable in those who agreed with the statement "I am interested in abstract ideas", then followed by education level.

Four things struck me from that as we struggle here with thinking about our general exhibitions and program offer:

1. There is a limit to the audience for museums (knew that but good reinforcement)
   
2. The limit '... appears to be driven by people's preferences for conceptual cognitive activity' (p.7)
   
3. Although education is a strong predictor it acts as an enabler in people participating in the museum experience
   
4. 'It may be that museums in large population centres cannot hope to reach all the people in their catchment, but perhaps over time, they can reach about two-thirds of them' (p.7)
   

In my recent survey of what Australians do online, I found that while those who visit museums undertake the same kinds of online activities (such as read blogs, comment on sites, use RSS feeds, etc), they were more likely to use a wiki; listen to a podcast; tag a web page; comment on a blog; post a rating/review; participate in a discussion board/forum; read a blog.

I'm wondering in future whether these kinds of stats will be affected by the online world and the new kinds of relationships museums will have with their audiences that visit them both virtually and physically? I'm becoming (surprisingly) more interested in how we then develop closer relationships in these aspects as we our rebuild our website and deeply think about our physical offer. To me, the conceptual aspects that Rob talks about are ripe for the picking in those who will interact with us online too.

Maybe time for some targeted research in this area??

Using Flickr as an evaluation tool

Check out the Flickr audience research site where childrens’ drawings of the African Impressions exhibition are stored. I’m experimenting with using these kind of sites as extra evaluation tools. Thanks to Ariel for doing all the scanning for me.

Any feedback welcome...

Biodiversity Exhibition Evaluations

This question from Georgina Bishop, Natural History Museum, London: Hi Lynda, Hope all is well with you. I am gathering some information on Biodiversity exhibitions as we are in the beginning stages of developing a brief for one that will happen as part of the NHM's masterplanning. I think that you also have a Biodiversity exhibition and I wondered if it would be possible for you to send me any front-end research you did as part of this.

Hi Georgina and I am well thanks! I have chosen to blog my response so others can have access.

We did a series of studies for our former Biodiversity: Life Supporting Life exhibition as follows:

• Frontend evaluation report, 1997: concepts, themes, prior understanding and interpretive approaches
  
• Formative evaluation report 1 1997: concepts, population issues and interpretive strategies
  
• Formative evaluation report 2, 1998: topics and concepts, merchandise and exhibition title
  
• Formative evaluation report 3, 1998: text, label and graphics testing
  
• Summative evaluation, 1998
  

These files have now posted on my wiki at a new page called Evaluation reports. When reading them you need to keep in mind the time they were conducted. I think many of the topics and understandings that we tested at that time would be vastly different now. For example, the issue of climate change was not really even thought about then. We have done work on climate change which I have blogged about here, so I would also reference that work when you are looking at biodiversity.

There is also a project called Who Cares about the Environment? run by the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation that has been tracking attitudes to, knowledge of and skills and behaviour of adults regarding the environment over many years and is worth checking out. I'm sure there have been studies of this kind in the UK too. The Pew Internet/Exploratorium report The Internet as a Resource for News and Information about Science is also relevant as it showed that 20% Americans used the internet to find out information about science, including environment and climate change issues (second only to television at 41%) and this has implications for the conjunction of physical exhibitions and what museums provide on the web I believe.

Good luck.

Presentations: Tubingen (Germany) and National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin)

Am currently in transit to Germany (via Ireland!) to visit colleagues at the Knowledge Media Research Centre, who are undertaking a major research project: Learning in museums: the role of media for the recontextualisation of objects. The project ‘... aims to explore the potential of digital media for learning in natural science museums and exhibitions’. They are holding their first workshop later this week called Learning in Museums: International Positions. I’m giving a pre-workshop lecture called What does learning mean in museums and the digital environment? I’ll be presenting data from my thesis and some initial work I’ve been doing on “ladders of participation” and what Australians are doing online.
Will also be a good opportunity to find out about their progress on their many projects, which have synergy with the work we are doing under both the New Literacy, New Audiences project and our Social Media in Museums ARC grant.
On Wednesday I travel back to Dublin to be a keynote speaker at the National Gallery of Ireland’s Education Symposium Museums, Galleries and Lifelong Learning: are museums doing enough to attract older audiences?
Both my papers have been uploaded on my wiki at this link: audience-research » Conference papers.
It’s a cold and rainy day here in Dublin as I’m waiting for my flight to Frankfurt (after a long flite from Sydney...). Looking forward to a hot shower!

Climate Change and Museums

Fiona Cameron asked me about audience research we have done on the topic of climate change. We conducted several studies as part of a larger research project investigating future exhibition topics.

The first study in 2006 consisted of two quantitative surveys — one with an online sample of 538 respondents from the greater Sydney region (mix of visitors and non-visitors to museums and galleries); and one with 319 visitors to the Australian Museum. Climate Change was chosen as the preferred exhibiton topic by 21% of online respondents and by 22% of the onsite sample. It was of high interest to 39% of Australian Museum visitors and 26% of online respondents.

Why is this topic so appealing? A range of reasons were given by respondents:

* It’s an important subject that we all need to know about:
“I think climate change should be of interest to everybody because it is our future. Will we survive?”
“I think we need to know more about climate change as it’s already happening.”
“Topical and at the forefront of everyone’s attention. Will foster necessary public debate. Is of great interest to all ages and backgrounds.”

* It’s a topic that children need to be educated about:
“Climate change is an important issue and one that I could take my children to see and discuss.”
“Educating the community and my kids about this pressing issue so we can make immediate changes.

* There is a lot of misinformation around and we can trust the Museum to give us the real facts:
“I think we need to know more unbiased reasonably proven facts regarding climate change.”
“Climate change is very current and something that the whole world, and even more, needs more in-depth study, shown and interpreted for us normal people out here.”

* We need to know what we can do:
“… we all need to be made aware, with tangible examples, of what’s happening and how we can help.”
“Climate’s a very good indicator of the environment, must learn so we can save the planet before things go very wrong.”

The second study in 2007 consisted of focus groups with a range of target audiences to unpack the issues further. Again, climate change was clearly the most popular exhibition topic across all groups because:

* It’s an issue that’s become personal
* In the past 12 months, the issue has moved beyond the realm of science into the mainstream
* The sense of personal responsibility has started to hit home
* People are confused and overwhelmed – can’t trust politicians, industry or lobby groups
* With all the media coverage and THAT MOVIE, there is significant background knowledge, but much of it is contradictory, making the issue even more confusing!
* With so much conflicting information regarding climate change, audiences are craving an authority on the issue to clear things up once and for all, and assist them in adopting a stance

We found that participants felt the Museum was in a perfect position to be that authority, as audiences see us as:
* A trusted source of scientific information and not aligned to a political party, lobby group or big business partner:
"It’s a perfect fit for the Museum, it’s science!"
"I think the Museum has a great chance to be the authority on this issue, people trust the Museum and its science."

Some questions people wanted an exhibition to help them with were:
What are acceptable levels of warming?
What are the possible outcomes, at varying degrees of warming?
Are these changes due to emissions or part of normal cycles?
What is our ability to reverse the effects?
What can I personally do?
What is renewable energy and what is its role in beating climate change?
How does my everyday existence contribute now?
Is there a tipping point, and have we passed it?

So, the interest is there, what are museums and like institutions doing about it??

A suitcase of portable meaning

Lynda, thanks for inviting me to post here.

As I was writing my paper, After the Show: Making sense after the event, for the Museums Australia Conference 2007, I was ruminating on the many ways that metaphors help exhibition visitors to make sense of their visiting experience. The National Gallery of Australia exhibition, Egyptian Treasures from the Louvre: Journey to the Afterlife, used the metaphor of the journey in its title and structure. When we spoke to visitors while evaluating the exhibition, we found that they often referred to the concept of a journey when speaking about their experience of the exhibition.



This had me thinking about whether the journey metaphor might apply to any exhibition.

It also had me thinking about the power of metaphors in any kind of communication. Looking around, I could see that metaphors are recommended in various communication fields. For example, Brian Clark espouses the power of the metaphor in writing on his Copywriter blog.

Given that museum exhibitions aim for excellent communication, I suddenly see the potential for more exhibitions to be conceived and structured around a powerful metaphor that can be a convenient suitcase of portable meaning for visitors. Or a handle they can grasp when they get challenged or disoriented. (See, it's fun playing with metaphors.)

What is your experience? How useful are metaphors as shaping-points for exhibitions? What exhibitions have you seen or presented that used metaphors? What were some lost opportunities?

Gillian Savage, Environmetrics.

ExhibitFiles Website

Check out ExhibitFiles - a great new website for exhibitions and museum staff - top stuff!

There is an interview with the site developers on Nina Simon's site which gives good insights to the thinking behind the development of ExhibitFiles.