What Makes a Museum Experience Stick?
Quick: think of a museum visit you still remember years later. Not the museum, the moment.
It was probably a feeling, a surprise, something you did, or someone you were with.
After decades of building exhibits and wandering through other people's creations, I've come to believe that memorable museum experiences share a handful of ingredients. Here are a few, with some museums that serve them up especially well.
1. A body in motion remembers.
Visitors forget what they read, and even what they see, but they remember what their bodies did. Climbing, crawling, building, getting a little lost.
Nobody does this better than City Museum in St. Louis, with everything from a 10-story slide to an in-house circus to a 3,000-pound praying mantis perched on the roof. And here's the creative "repurposing" lesson hiding in plain sight: its exhibits consist largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects, from colorful tiles to safety deposit boxes to stainless steel buffet pans. Salvage plus imagination beats a big budget every time.
2. Take one sense away, and the others wake up.
Sometimes the most memorable thing you can do is remove something. The Exploratorium's Tactile Dome has been doing this since 1971. Visitors journey through total darkness, relying on touch to navigate the twists, turns, and textures inside. I love that the original press release described it as a carefully planned and structured succession of shapes, temperatures, and textures. That's exhibit development in a nutshell: it feels spontaneous to the visitor because someone sequenced it very deliberately.
3. Real stories about real people.
Big themes ("Immigration!" "Love!" "Loss!") are hard to hold onto. Specific people are easy.
The Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side has built its whole model around this. Two historic tenements on Orchard Street, home to an estimated 15,000 people from more than 20 nations between 1863 and 2000, represent the heart of the museum. You don't walk away thinking about "immigration policy"; you walk away thinking about a particular family in a particular cramped apartment.
Halfway around the world, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb takes this idea somewhere wonderfully strange. The thematic display takes visitors through a series of different emotions associated with break-up, illustrated by objects donated by members of the public. Everyday objects plus a short personal story. That's it! It's proof that you don't need priceless artifacts to create unforgettable exhibits; you need meaning.
4. Watch it, then make it.
Demonstrations are great. Demonstrations followed by "now you try it" are even better.
At the Corning Museum of Glass, you can watch live glassblowing demonstrations daily in the 500-seat Amphitheater Hot Shop, then head to Make Your Own Glass to try it yourself. (They're even offering seasonal Hot Glass demos and the chance to create your own glass pumpkin right now, just in time for Halloween.) And the best part? You go home with a physical souvenir that you made.
5. Permission to feel something.
Do you notice a thread running through all these examples? None of them are trying to be neutral. City Museum wants you giddy. The Tactile Dome wants you a little disoriented. The Tenement Museum and the Museum of Broken Relationships want you to feel empathy, maybe even shed a tear.
Too often, we design exhibits to be informative and "safe" and end up with something pleasant and forgettable. Memorable experiences take an emotional risk.
So what does this mean for exhibit developers?
Before your next project heads into design, try asking a few simple questions:
• What will visitors do here? With their bodies, not just their eyes?
• Whose specific story are we telling?
• What do we want people to feel?
• What will they take home, either literally or figuratively?
Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!
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