Dramatizing the Museum Experience

Overwhelmingly in today’s society people are being pulled away from concrete relationships and instead replacing them with bits of data. Relationships and information are being represented as statistics, rather than important emotional bonds and knowledge. There is an alarming trend of not what your friends mean to you, but how many you have (on Facebook.) To reach people both on a personal level and engage them on an intellectual level, it is important to understand how to connect with them. Examining the arts, and more specifically museums, we can begin to understand how these cultural, philosophical, historical, and artistic languages are interacting with the general populace. Museums from 2002-2008 suffered significant declining attendance, but in 2009 and 2010, those figures have begun to turn around. I contend that to make a museum experience more engaging and interactive, a story must be created around the content, essentially dramatizing it.

I am not purporting that digital content take over as the interactive medium, far from it in fact. I believe there is an incredible value to tangible experiences that provide many different types of haptic and contextual feedback, but more and more, these physical experiences will have to bridge with digital content to engage viewers. Jesse Rosen, president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, mentions, "There is a fundamental change happening in our lives. There's a sense that we have an old way of defining participating in the arts and that the public is redefining what participation means, the challenge for us is to see where the public is and engage with them and adapt."

Technology changes the way we do things; it changes our values and norms, and affects the information that we process. Marshall Mcluhan emphasizes that, “the medium is the message,” but with all of our content, how can we use different mediums to provide our message? To make an impact, to construct an experience, we have to provide a story. “In an experience, [there is] flow from something to something. As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors” (Dewey, 36). People have been engaged, entertained, and fascinated by stories and storytelling for thousands of years. There are essentially five elements that make up a story: the act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (more commonly known as the who, what, where, why, and how.) Stories are not words, but experiences; by using these elements to dramatize information you can create an experience though various mediums that affect a change in people.

“The goal of the designer [is] to be persuasive or at least informative… [they] must anticipate the spectator’s reactions and meet his own aesthetic needs. He must therefore discover a means of communication between himself and the spectator – to discover a [story] universally comprehensible, one that translates abstract ideas into concrete forms” (Rand,7). Science/technology museums and centers are a unique exception to declining attendance in museums, reporting far and away the highest increase in attendance of any type of museum in any location according to the American Association of Museums. It is not a coincidence that this is happening, because more than any other, they have found a way to combine education with interaction. Rather than just staring at a poster on the wall, asking you to read about clouds, you can walk up to a machine that shows you how clouds are formed as it physically creates one in front of you. It is a powerful tool being able to see and understand conceptual information in a physical manifestation. “Man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating” (Pieper, 25); they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but an experience, it is priceless.

"We're seeing a backlash starting to emerge against the rapidly increasing level of consumerism and luxury in the economy," said James Chung, president of the firm Reach Advisors. "It's not about how much they spend. It's about how they're spending their time" (Zongker). Families no longer want the biggest and best, in a sense they do, but not in the form of consumerism as commonly believed, but rather in experiences. It is my belief that Technology and Science museums are connecting with their audiences better than other museums by creating a meaningful balance between the medium and the message, by essentially adding a narrative. Many of their exhibits are about letting the participants actively engage and interact with physical and digital content. For example, if they want to learn about simple machines you can present a pulley and create many different scenarios about the who, what, how, why, and where it is used and let people enact and experience that scenario by employing different methods. Now, there are two aspects to dramatism: story and method. Story is the ‘who, what, how, where, and why,’ but method is the medium, method for engagement, stories perspective, formula, visual elements, and the progression of narrative. There are many ways to imbue dramatism into the content, but the true goal is to combine it with the medium as well, in order to attract the audience.

John Dewey lays claim that fine arts will never be as popular as music because, “fine arts consist of qualities; that of experience having intellectual conclusion are signs or symbols having no intrinsic quality of their own, but standing for things that may in another experience be qualitatively experienced (Dewey, 38). But, he stops to add that fine arts is an esthetic quality, one that cannot be left out from an intellectual experience, because they create a complete experience. I agree that as it is now the fine arts are one-sided, but this is mainly due to its presentation and the experience that is created around it. If museums were to dramatize elements and create a stimulating experience through practical, emotional, and intellectual engagement that focused on storytelling, it would be much more effective.

We can see the beginnings of this as artists and designers begin to create immersive museums that present content in new ways. By using technology and stories to augment the experiences they become more engaging. Offering audio headsets, or iPhone apps to inform or interact with people is just the first step at engaging; there is more to be done. It is an issue not just for the museums, but also for the designers and content providers, they need to figure out ways to engage their audience or they are going to lose them. How can they do this? I propose, by telling a good story.

References

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