Abstract
The research project is a small pilot study of the restorative aspects of museum experience on children; these include the sense of fascination during the visit. Museum environmental awareness was a latecomer to Museum and Visitor studies but is now highly valued. No longer just the “objects” contained in the museum fascinate but also the environment itself becomes an object of fascination. Some authors provide a clear categorization of feelings experienced by the visitor during a museum experience and suggest a framework with four categories of satisfying experience: objective, cognitive, introspective, and social. In designing our study, we began with the definition of museum experience and added a fifth category of “environmental experience.” With this term, we refer to the extent to which the physical environment in and around a museum affects visitors. Indeed, our aim is to analyze the visitor’s stream of feelings and opinions during a museum visit (specifically, the MART—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto) to find a proper definition of the aesthetic elements characterizing the “environmental preference.” To do this, we referenced classical and experimental paradigms of Environmental Psychology applied to a museum context and building aesthetic researches, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The case study involved 41 children, 20 male and 21 female, from two primary school classes in Rovereto (Italy); the average age was 8.3 years old.
Highlights
In this paper, we review the development of the ways that the relationship between museums and visitors can be understood
Among the 21 fundamental concepts of museology listed in the reference tool Key Concepts of Museology edited by ICOM’s International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM), we find the term “architecture” but not “environment.” “Architecture is defined as the art of designing and installing or building a space that will be used to house specific museum functions, more the functions of exhibition and display, preventive and remedial active conservation, study, management, and receiving visitors
We look for the elements that refer to MART museum environment
Summary
We review the development of the ways that the relationship between museums and visitors can be understood. Starting from the definition of the “museum experience,” we underline a quite underdeveloped issue in museum studies, that is the relevance of the museum physical environment, considering the museum as a restorative environment (Packer and Bond, 2010). The museum experience is changing as a result of the recent interest in the emotional nature of museum visiting; some museums are moving away from formal, didactic models of museum learning toward new models that embrace experimental activities. Educational and environmental psychology have underlined the relevance of the attributes of the learning setting, searching for the correlation between students in a given context (LinnenbrinkGarcia and Pekrun, 2011). We describe a small case study, aimed at extending our Museum Environmental Experience understanding of the ways in which the nature of a museum building can impact young visitors. We pay attention to the children’s visiting experience within the museum, investigating the interpretation of the children’s aesthetic experience within the museum environment, during and after museum learning activities
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