Group therapy: I suffer from a love-hate relationship with visitors
Find this session's presentations here.
As public engagement professionals, we are all tormented by a love-hate relationship with visitors. We love them so hard and put so much effort into pleasing them day after day, seeing to all their physiological needs, pointing them in the right direction, never blaming them for asking the same question over and over again, keeping the flame alive with incessant new experiences, games and costumes… and what do we get in return? They never do what we want them to do; they always find ways to break things no matter how hard we try to make them unbreakable; they don’t even get what we are trying to explain.
A cohort of courageous patients have stepped forward and will sit on our sofa to share their neurotic and obsessional relationships with audiences. These frustrated exhibition developers, audience researchers, designers, explainers etc. need your support and empathic cheers, dear audience, as they let their inner self out and face their personal demons, Pecha-Kucha style, under the guidance of our two specialist clinicians.
And who knows? This cathartic exercise might even free us all of our professional grumpiness and allow us to start a new relationship with audiences on a solid basis.
Facilitator
Exhibitions and Interpretation Manager
The Natural History Museum
Session speakers
I must confess: i really need this therapy. Staying all the time on exhibition floors or doing activities about sustainability topics, it's always a challenge. So, please, help me find the right balance between love and hate. I'll show you the most incredible questions, i'll speak about moments that make me love this job, i'll explain why sometimes it's better to count to 10 before saying anything wrong.
During the development phase of an exhibition all eventualities for possible misuse of exhibits through different user groups are discussed again and again by curators, designers and experts to avoid all possible pitfalls. But what happens when visitors still find unintentional interactive offers in your optimized exhibits?
Manager, Urban Barcode Project
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
New York City
United States
Drawing on a decade of teaching hands-on science in both formal and informal settings I will talk about participants finding creative ways to seemingly obvious solutions, students deep love to food, fire and fieldwork, the brutal world of science street fairs and how to have fun within all if this!
Directrice des Editions et Transmédia - Digital director
Pack, Cackle, Flock or Herd? But how do you name a group of this curious species that we call visitors...?
Over the last few years I witnessed the most bizarre group behaviours. Since, I wonder whether I’ll ever be able to design a successful visitor journey for those wild beings which are so different from idealised "independent adults".
I need to get some things off my chest in this therapy session, concerning the art of Tinkering with our visitors. Is it only me who feels that parents and children can be such a pain at times? May I talk about overachieving parents, boasting they have young Einstein’s? May I complain about parents rushing their kids in slow-space environments, or about kids gluing together moving parts?
At CERN we love technology (we invented the world-wide web and were pioneers of computer touch screen technologies after all). We also love it when our visitors find creative ways of improving the technology in our exhibitions. But why oh why do they always want to touch the screens that are not touch screens? Is it time for the don’t-touch screen?
Senior Manager for Audience Research and Insight
The Victoria and Albert Museum
Visitor research would be so much easier without the visitors. Feel my pain as I share the challenges of conducting evaluations with visitors and rejoice with me as I find ways to overcome them.
