Designing for emotion: impact and evaluation
Find this session's presentations here.
We all want our visitors to connect with an exhibition and feel something, whether that’s surprise, awe, inspiration or even shock. Most museums use audience profiles to inform their design. And although they can give you some useful insight, they don’t tell you much about how to create an emotional impact.
Research shows that designers often use three tools to design for emotional impact. They are participation, storytelling and digital technologies. But do these tools actually lead to a better visitor experience? In this session we'll lead you through three experiences that each focussed on one of these tools. We’ll talk about the pros and cons, the effect on visitor experience and behaviour and, most importantly, how you can use this knowledge to create emotional impact in your own exhibitions.
Facilitator
Experience and exhibition designer
Session speakers
PhD-Researcher & Lecturer Media Studies | Mediatised Experiences in Heritage
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Bernadette Schrandt will dive into the effects of innovative technologies used to enrich historical objects. Do they lead to enhanced visitor engagement, inspiration and a better learning experience? She will present the results of her research at 8 Dutch museums, where she monitored both the design process of new exhibitions where technology was used to enrich the experience and how visitors responded to these exhibitions. For more info, see www.designingexperiencescapes.com.
Bernd Holtwick discusses how storytelling works to engage teenagers in a really dull exhibition topic like occupational safety and health and how DASA plans to find out about the potentials of storytelling more systematically. He will also briefly show how DASA used quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods to get to these results. For more info, see https://www.dasa-dortmund.de/en/home.
Exhibitions and Interpretation Manager
Victoria Thomas will talk about about how participation helps connect visitors to a subject and each other, as well as encouraging them to make positive behaviour changes. She shares the techniques and devices used at the Zoo to channel an emotional engagement with a species into a positive conservation behaviour change.
