Thursday, Panel 1, AUDITORIUM 10:30 - 13:00
What is enjoyment in museums
All presentations in this panel:
- Enjoyment – why else would they come? Stéphanie Wintzerith, Visitor studies, audience research and evaluation for museums and other cultural institutions, Karlsruhe, Germany
- How to listen to the audience? Elaine Fontana, Berlin, Germany
- The concept of enjoyment as seen by psychologists and its application to the museum visit, Colette Dufresne-Tassé, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
- Enjoyment in guided tours for adults: The museum guides’ perceptions of their aims and methods in guided tours, Inga Specht, Franziska Loreit, Johannes Wahl, Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change, Museum Koenig, Bonn, Bonn, Germany
- Survey on Museums and Cultural Creative Industries and the Impact of the COVID-19 on Museums in Turkey, Ibrahim Turan, IUC Buyukcekmece Yerleskesi, Istanbul, Turkey
Enjoyment – why else would they come?
Stéphanie Wintzerith, Visitor studies, audience research and evaluation for museums and other cultural institutions
Karlsruhe, Germany
Keywords: Audience, joyful visits, museum definition, experience
Visiting a museum is typically a leisure activity and thus (hopefully) freely chosen. Would they come if expecting a boring visit or an unpleasant time? Would they come back if they did not like their former visit? Certainly not. They expect an agreeable time, for some sort of pleasure during the visit, for outstanding objects and interesting information. In other words, they come to the museum to enjoy themselves. It may not be their sole reason, but it surely is one of the most powerful motivations to the visit and a common expectation of audiences.
Enjoyment: the word is still in the new museum definition, so it must be an important one. The term “enjoyment” is both the result (the pleasure felt) and the cause, the satisfaction of the moment, however fleeting. It may be an emotion, or the way satisfaction is felt. It may be a positive feeling or the reaction to an expectation that is fulfilled or exceeded. Pleasure(s), "delight", amusement, the joy felt, happiness in an exhibition, all this is included in the topic of enjoyment
What is it that turns a visit into a pleasant experience, what is it that makes it so enjoyable? And what do the audiences themselves say about having fun in the museum, enjoying themselves in the exhibitions, using the different programs that museum educators have prepared for them? Though enjoyment has not often been the direct object of audience research, it is worth diving into the corpus of visitor studies caried out in the last few years. We’ll find useful hints about enjoyment, satisfaction, behavior and the way those notions are intertwined. We’ll find some clues about aspects that foster enjoyment and aspects that inhibit it. And most of all, we’ll hear in their own words what visitors say made their visit experience enjoyable.
Presentation Stéphanie Wintzerith
How to listen to the audience?
Elaine Fontana
Berlin, Germany
How to listen to the audience of the exhibition and, consequently, re-examine the practices of the teams, in their relationship with the visitors, so that the experience is great!
By placing yourself in the position of listener and observer of the public, of yourself and your peers, the educator can raise new hypotheses, seek work logics and unimaginable ways of operating until having heard them (by allowing yourself to hear them).
The intention is to experience a way of being in the museum that facilitates other listening, different from those that have already been signified by the mediation/education teams over the last exhibitions. A practice of annotation/notation of listening can be used as a reference, in order to enable the description or mere recording of what is strange to us and our expectations.
Listening can generate records that do not need to be meant immediately, thus avoiding a precipitation of meanings, which are integrated into the same already systematized field of knowledge of the teams working on the exhibition. It is important to make the record a piece of data to be observed by people other in the team, considering new understandings for what is being heard and experienced in the exhibition space by the public.
The concept of enjoyment as seen by psychologists and its application to the museum visit
Colette Dufresne-Tassé
Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
Literally, enjoyment means having joy. But contemporary psychologists see enjoyment in a much more complex way. Indeed, they conceive it as a pleasant psychological state that appears when performing an activity for which the person feels competent and closely related to the "other", i.e., to the unfamiliar subject he or she is exploring.
Enjoyment has two components: a pleasure component and a joy component. The proposed presentation explores both components and their implications for the museum visit through examples drawn from empirical research on the meaning-making and the immersive experience of adult visitors.
Note: Logistical support for this research was provided by the Université de Montréal and the financial one, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Presentation Colette Dufresne-Tassé
Enjoyment in guided tours for adults: The museum guides’ perceptions of their aims and methods in guided tours
Inga Specht, Franziska Loreit, Johannes Wahl
Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change, Museum Koenig, Bonn
Bonn, Germany
Keywords: guided tours, docents, qualitative research, aims, methods
Person-led guided tours are one of the most frequent and most common educational programs in museums, especially for adults (Institut für Museumsforschung, 2018; Sachatello-Sawyer et al., 2002). They fulfil the key functions of delivering information and interpretive content, and mediating interaction between visitors and artefacts (Tran & King, 2007; Tinio, Smith, & Potts, 2010). However, even though they are frequently conducted, they have been little researched so far (Best, 2012). This presentation contributes to the empirical knowledge about guided tours by answering the following questions: 1) Which methods are used from guides to actively involve adult visitors in a guided tour in museums? 2) What aims underlies the (non-)use of methods? This article presents research relating to how guides perceive their role, identity, and practice. The research study utilized a qualitative inquiry. The data are based on a total of 40 guided interviews with guides conducted in four different types of museums (art museums, science and technology museums, natural history/science museums, and cultural-history museums) in 2019. Guides are on average 52 years old (SD = 11.61), have been giving tours for an average of 16 years (SD = 12.26; 13 (33%) guides less than 10 years), and 57% (n = 23) guide daily or several times a week. The interview transcripts were analyzed using the focused interview analysis (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2020). We categorize different docents’ aims that can be associated to different methods used. Findings from this study also indicate that guides use methods not arbitrarily. Moreover, guides from different museum types have a similar understanding of their practice, nevertheless used methods varies.
Presentation Inga Specht, Johannes Wahl and Franziska Loreit
Survey on Museums and Cultural Creative Industries and the Impact of the COVID-19 on Museums in Turkey
Ibrahim Turan
IUC Buyukcekmece Yerleskesi
Istanbul, Turkey
Keywords: InnoMade Project, Cultural Creative Industries, Digitalization, COVID-19, Museum
European Commission’s Creative Europe framework program highlights the potential of creative economies. In this context, the status of museums as a core part of the creative economy has been studied across Europe by the Network of European Museum Organization (NEMO) in 2015 and 2017. This research on museums and the creative industries shows that museums’ role in the context of creative industries across Continental Europe has only been vaguely recognized. Even though collaboration with other creative industries was seen as advantageous, such partnerships were not top of the agenda for museum governing bodies. NEMO also investigated the impact of the COVID-19 situation on museums in Europe in 2020. Unfortunately, these studies conducted by NEMO do not include museums in Turkey. According to the data of the Ministry of Culture, there are total of 494 museums in Turkey in 2021, of which 205 are public and 289 are private. This research, carried out within the framework of the project titled Innovative Museums for a Digital Europe (INNOMADE), aims to examine both how museums in our country are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential of our museums to cooperate with the creative and cultural industries in a digitalized Europe. The data required for the research will be obtained by using a 25-item questionnaire developed by the researchers based on the relevant literature and expert opinions. Within the scope of the research, it is aimed to reach all public and private museums operating in Turkey, which constitute the research population, using an online questionnaire. Analysis of the survey data will reveal the cultural creative industries, digitalization capacities of museums in Turkey, and their level of resilience to the adverse conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
