The Science of Museums

Monterey Bay Aquarium

he most common type of visitor-evaluation study takes place early during the production of an exhibit. Typically, the designers craft a rough mock-up and put it on the museum floor for a few days or weeks. Trained observers then analyze how people interact with it.

This process can identify obstacles that might prevent a visitor from experiencing what the museum intends. Potential roadblocks can be as mundane as a knob that's hard to reach, instructions that are too complicated, or an interactive display that takes too long to respond. Yet, even an exhibit that operates flawlessly can possess subtle features that undermine its message, notes Sue Allen, one of two full-time evaluators at the Ekploratorium in San Francisco. To find these problems, evaluators must talk to visitors and be alert for cues that the viewers are drawing inappropriate conclusions about what they see, hear, or feel.

Allen encountered one such conceptual booby trap late in the design of an exhibit depicting dynamic equilibrium. A feedback system, it employed a variable strength electromagnet to suspend a metal sphere midair.

A light shone toward a sensor positioned behind the ball. Whenever the ball blocked the beam, the light sensor When the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History decided to update its 30-year-old Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals a decade ago, the curators accepted that its centerpiece would remain its famous necklace-the one sporting the 45.5-carat Hope diamond (left). The most viewed museum object in the world, it draws more than 5 million visitors annually.

The challenge to staff scientists lay in attracting visitors to the hall's many other exhibits, recalls Lynn D. Dierking of the Institute for Learning Innovation QLI) in Annapolis, Md. The museum hired her firm to evaluate key facets of the renovation project.

Fortunately, Dierking notes, the curators' task turned out to be far less daunting than they had anticipated. Only 10 percent of the hall's visitors come solely to view the Hope diamond, ILI's surveys revealed. Moreover, 40 percent made Geology, Gems, and Minerals their first stop at the museum even though this exhibition is on the second floor, requiring a walk past the entry level's renowned dinosaur exhibit. She concludes, "We've got destination shoppers"-visitors clearly drawn to crystals, meteorites, and volcanoes.

Collectively, US. science and technology centers bring in more than 130 million visitors each year. And increasingly, their most successful exhibits owe as much to evaluation of visitor reactions as they do to ample budgets and careful planning, says Jeff Hayward, a 21-year veteran evaluator who directs People, Places & Design Research in Northamp ton, Mass.

Fifteen to 20 years ago, virtually no museums considered evaluations to be part of their exhibitdevelopment process, says ILI director John H. Falk. Indeed, exhibit appraisals "were more curiosities than management tools until about 10 years ago," Hayward maintains.

Even today, though the need for evaluation is well accepted in the sciencemuseum community, "there are still probably only a handful of institutions in the country that are religious about it, in the sense that they do it for all of their exhibitions and programs," Falk maintains.

One of the most conscientious institutions is the Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum in Chicago. Patty McNamara of Adler argues that creating a project without evaluation amounts to gambling with what are often huge budgets and also with the opportunity to communicate the intended message.

sent a signal to the electromagnet to cut its strength. As soon as it did, the ball would fall, permitting the light beam to fully illuminate the sensor. This triggered the device to boost the electromagnet's strength, pulling the ball back up. Museum-goers could block the beam with their hand or grab the ball out of the system and drop it back in.

"People learned how to use it the right way and were having fun with it," Allen says. But in speaking with them, she quickly realized that, conceptually, they just "weren't getting it."

The dangling ball-purchased on the basis of its size, weight, material, and low cost-happened to be painted like a world globe. "When we asked visitors what the display represented," she says, "they told us it was obviously a model of the solar system," with the light beam depicting the sun. Many particularly enjoyed the way the floating "Earth" tended to spin in space.

Allen has since stripped the misleading design from the silvery ball.

somewhat newer type of museum study attempts to determine whether a completed exhibit achieves its intended goals. Visitors leaving a show on women's health, for instance, might be surveyed for evidence that they gleaned the importance of breast selfexams or learned SEPTEMBER 19,1998 the appropriate way 5

This type of sum-$ ming-up study was cow d u c t e d in a 30,000-; square-foot outdoor physics playground that opened last year at the New York Hall of Science in New York City. Fifth graders were let loose among interactive e x h i b i t s designed to demonstrate various scientific principles-from angular Evaluators discovered that the earthly paint job that momentum and fluid happened to be on a ball in one exhibit misled visitors into mechanics to levers thinking they were looking at a model of the solar system (left and energy transfer. "We didn't put up any signs, initially, because we wanted to see what type would be most useful," explains Alan J. Friedman, the museum's director. However, the exhibit's evaluation, completed in July, indicates that this wait-and-see approach yielded unanticipated benefits.