Family visits, group visits, educational visits. As a science centre or museum we want to facilitate a lot of different visitors at the same time. We want to increase the number of visitors to maximise the amount of people that come into contact with science and technology, but with an increase of visitors it can be difficult to keep the quality high. How do we cope with the difficult contradiction between quality and quantity? How can we facilitate a lot of people, giving them a great experience while maintaining high quality?
In this session, different institutions share their solutions. After two short presentations there will be an opportunity for exchange of experiences between participants.
Facilitator
Session speakers
Senior Vice President for Exhibits and Research
Boston
United States
The Museum of Science, Boston recently altered its approach to designing exhibitions. In the past, our exhibits featured 30 to 40 different activities, with each activity facilitating groups of two-to-four visitors. Recently, we’ve created galleries with far fewer activities, but designed these activities to facilitate much larger groups of 10 to 15 visitors and to engage them for longer periods of time. This strategy has allowed us to both increase the quality of the experience (longer stay time at activities leads to deeper learning) and reach a greater quantity of visitors.
Programme Manager - International Relations and Learning
Hellerup
Denmark
At Experimentarium we have changed the ‘extra’ offers we give to schools and the set-up of our workshops over the last few years to facilitate more people and at the same time give them a great experience. We want to give insight and reach each individual visitor and to do this with large amounts of visitors at certain times needed changes. Sheena Laursen from Experimentarium will show examples of these changes and also show how they connect with our ‘re-developed exhibitions’ which now have become ‘individual universes’ enabling our visitors to engage more in certain topics and allowing more visitors to engage at one time.