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The first book to take a "visitor's eye view" of the museum visit, updated to incorporate advances in research, theory, and practice in the museum field over the last twenty years.
The first book to take a "visitor's eye view" of the museum visit when it was first published in 1992, The Museum Experience revolutionized the way museum professionals understand their constituents. Falk and Dierking have updated this essential reference, incorporating advances in research, theory, and practice in the museum field over the last twenty years. Written in clear, non-technical style, The Museum Experience Revisited paints a thorough picture of why people go to museums, what they do there, how they learn, and what museum practitioners can do to enhance these experiences.
This book provides a thorough introduction to what is known about why people visit museums, what they do there, and that they learn. It offers recommendations and guidelines to help museum staff understand their clientele and their interactions with them.
In the second edition of their 2000 book, John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking offer an updated version of the Contextual Model of Learning, as well as present the latest advances in museum research, theory, and practice in order to provide readers an inside view of how and why people learn from their museum experiences.
As the first book to take a "visitor's eye view" of the museum visit, The Museum Experience revolutionized the way museum professionals understand their constituents. Falk and Dierking integrate their original research from a wide variety of disciplines as well as visitor studies from institutions ranging from science centers and zoos to art and natural history museums. Written in clear, non-technical style, The Museum Experience paints a thorough picture of why people go to museums, what they do there, how they learn, and what museum practitioners can do to enhance these experiences. This book is an essential reference for all museum professionals and students of museum studies, and has been used widely for higher education courses in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., and has been translated into Japanese and Chinese. Originally published in 1992, the book is now available from Left Coast Press, Inc. as of November 2010.
Understanding the visitor experience provides essential insights into how museums can affect people’s lives. Personal drives, group identity, decision-making and meaning-making strategies, memory, and leisure preferences, all enter into the visitor experience, which extends far beyond the walls of the institution both in time and space. Drawing upon a career in studying museum visitors, renowned researcher John Falk attempts to create a predictive model of visitor experience, one that can help museum professionals better meet those visitors’ needs. He identifies five key types of visitors who attend museums and then defines the internal processes that drive them there over and over again. Through an understanding of how museums shape and reflect their personal and group identity, Falk is able to show not only how museums can increase their attendance and revenue, but also their meaningfulness to their constituents.
"Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals" is a multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the discussion of all aspects of handling, preserving, researching, and organizing collections. Curators, archivists, collections managers, preparators, registrars, educators, students, and others contribute.
This state-of-the-art book explores the implications of contemporary trends that are shaping the future of museum experiences. In four separate sections, it looks into how museums are developing dialogical relationships with their audiences, reaching out beyond their local communities to involve more diverse and broader audiences. It examines current practices in involving crowds, not as passive audiences but as active users, co-designers and co-creators; it looks critically and reflectively at the design implications raised by the application of novel technologies, and by museums becoming parts of connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. Overall, the book chapters deal with aspects such as sociality, creation and sharing as ways of enhancing dialogical engagement with museum collections. They address designing experiences – including participatory exhibits, crowd sourcing and crowd mining – that are meaningful and rewarding for all categories of audiences involved. Museum Experience Design reflects on different approaches to designing with novel technologies and discusses illustrative and diverse roles of technology, both in the design process as well as in the experiences designed through those processes. The trend of museums becoming embedded in ecosystems of organisations and people is dealt with in chapters that theoretically reflect on what it means to design for ecosystems, illustrated by design cases that exemplify practical and methodological issues in doing so. Written by an interdisciplinary group of design researchers, this book is an invaluable source of inspiration for researchers, students and professionals working in this dynamic field of designing experiences for and around museums.
Designing Museum Experiences is a “how-to” book for creating visitor-centered museums that emotionally and intellectually connect with museum visitors, stakeholders, and donors. Museums are changing from static, monolithic, and encyclopedic institutions to institutions that are visitor-centric, with shared authority that allows museum and visitors to become co-creators in content creation. Museum content is also changing, from static content to dynamic, evolving content that is multi-cultural and transparent regarding the evolution of facts and histories, allowing multi-person interpretations of events. Designing Museum Experiences leads readers through the methods and tools of the three stages of a museum visit (Pre-visit, In-Person Visit, and Post-visit), with a goal of motivating visitors to return and revisit the museum in the future. This museum visitation loop creates meaningful intellectual, emotional, and experiential value for the visitor. Using the business-world-proven methodologies of user centered design, Museum Visitor Experience leads the reader through the process of creating value for the visitor. Providing consistent messaging at all touchpoints (website, social media, museum staff visitor services, museum signage, etc.) creates a trusted bond between visitor and museum. The tools used to increase understanding of and encourage empathy for the museum visitor, and understand visitor motivations include: Empathy Mapping, Personas, Audience segmentation, Visitor Journey Mapping, Service Design Blueprints, System Mapping, Content Mapping, Museum Context Mapping, Stakeholder Mapping, and the Visitor Value Proposition. In the end, the reason for using the tools is to empower visitors and meet their emotional and intellectual needs, with the goal of creating a lifelong bond between museum and visitor. This is especially important as museums face a new post COVID-19 reality; only the most nimble, visitor-centered museums are likely to survive. The companion website to Designing Museum Experiences features: Links to additional visitor-centered museum information Downloadable sample documents and templates Bibliography of sources for further reading Online glossary of museum visitor experience terms Daily checklists of “how-to” provide and receive visitor-centered experiences More than 50 associated Designing Museum Experiences documents
