Engaging the Visitor: Designing Exhibits That Work

"Without involved, engaged attention, the museum visitor experience is meaningless." - Stephen Bitgood.





Engaging The Visitor addresses some of the most fundamental issues relating to interpretation, exhibition design and the visitor experience - in a format which is attractive, approachable - and above all actionable. Challenging many preconceptions, this book is firmly based on the results of gallery-based scientific research rather than speculation.

Deep and effective engagement with exhibit content is still the exception in very many museums. When most visitors pass an exhibit with only a glance, it will fail to engage. And until the visitor is engaged no informal learning - or any other satisfying experience - will happen…

Engaging The Visitor will help you answer the questions: 1 How often do visitors really engage with the content of the exhibitions in our museum? 2 How frequently can I really expect our visitors to be meaningfully engaged? 3 Why do our visitors engage with some of our exhibits and not others? 4 How can we increase our visitors' engagement through better exhibit design?