Abstract
Museums are much more than repositories of cultural relics to be preserved for the future. They are centers of learning, community centers, social hubs—even places of healing and contemplation. The museum experience is a multilayered journey that is proprioceptive, sensory, aesthetic and social. In this context, this study takes the case of the ‘People at the Seashore’ multisensory area in the folk exhibition of Taizhou Museum, applies three data collection techniques (questionnaire, in-depth interview and observation) to assess various types of experiences (object, cognitive, social and introspective) and effects (visceral, cognitive and emotional) in the museum, and analyzes the practical effect and relative merits of the multisensory approaches used in this exhibition through the lens of communication effect. Accordingly, multi-senses acquire creative significances upon the attractive and holding power of museum exhibitions, specifically the emotional relevance and resonances. Thus, museums should be more concerned with the connection and complex interaction between senses and experience, meanwhile be active with visual, auditory, olfactory, taste and proprioceptive experiences and engage in the potential impact on visitors from cognitive and emotional aspects, which is an important trend for the museum’s future development and also the vision of this study.
Highlights
Museums reach out to their communities by facilitating important and relevant conversations through their collections and by making the objects accessible and meaningful to a wide variety of visitors
Through the visualization and interpretation of information embedded in the objects, phenomena connect, arrange, express conforming to the logic of information, embed the storyline with abundant meanings into space, attaching the emotion into the context, witness the musealization from objects to memories, which is significant inside museum, and towards the transformation of daily life with engaging connotation, ranging from a tiny portable object to a large city, people, things, objects and meanings that are related to the living world can be entirely musealized, creating prevalent memory museums
With the ‘sensory shift’, modern museums have begun to reconsider their limitations to the sensory use of objects, and they are starting to explore the potential of multi-sensory solutions to improve knowledge transfer in museums and increase engagement with visitors by connecting them with the sensory properties of historic objects, their contexts and the stories behind, providing emotionally enriched experiences
Summary
Museums reach out to their communities by facilitating important and relevant conversations through their collections and by making the objects accessible and meaningful to a wide variety of visitors. Through the visualization and interpretation of information embedded in the objects, phenomena connect, arrange, express conforming to the logic of information, embed the storyline with abundant meanings into space, attaching the emotion into the context, witness the musealization from objects to memories, which is significant inside museum, and towards the transformation of daily life with engaging connotation, ranging from a tiny portable object to a large city, people, things, objects and meanings that are related to the living world can be entirely musealized, creating prevalent memory museums In this case, museum becomes a place that exhibits objects, but that allows visitors to experience, understand and even embody a story through those objects as well. If the spectrum of museum experience modal is step-by-step on depth, Doering’s museum experience types are covered by range, of which the significances embrace from object, cognition to introspective and social experience, enclose the purposes of visiting and by which the behaviors motivated, making a suggestive contribution to the observation of this research
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