Stamps and Stakes of the Visitor Experience

My tasks for the day:

1. Read Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience by John H. Falk, to determine what sort of people are coming to visit the PARI facility. I intend to supplement this by talking to the people visiting the PARI facility, which seems like a decent random sampling method. I'm also fairly sure that nobody has actually done that yet, at least not for these purposes. 
2. Figure out what to do with these stamps. Or any stamps. Possibly including my collection, since I have more I can add. (in terms of some of the Apollo, Gemini, and International missions.) Figure out if it's worthwhile to do an exhibit on philately. Possibly show the stamps I have handy to any visitors I see, figure out if it's something of interest. (Excuse me sir/madam! Can I explain the significance of this 1992 postage stamp to you?)

These are the space related ones. There are...dozens of randoms as well.

Because, in addition to more rocks than anybody could...um...throw a rock at, a large collection of meteorites, a small collection of fossils, satellites, satellite models, antennae of all shapes and sizes, a lunar lander model, an Apollo-Soyuz model, a (loosely 20" tall) Saturn V model, and bits from the Space Shuttle... we also have two Sears-Roebuck boxes of stamps, which are presumably organised in a system only known to the original philatelist who donated them. 

15 of which I can conclusively determine are space related, three more which might be related to a satellite tracking facility that existed in 1976 Indonesia.

Or maybe not. My Indonesian is, as one might expect from a white girl in North Carolina, is basically nonexistent. 

Can anybody read Indonesian? 

THAT BEING SAID, I also have a written assignment for the week. 

When constructing the visitor experience, what are the key things to note? 

or, to paraphrase the exact phrasing, If one was to build a building and call it, "The Visitor Experience", what sort of stakes might we put in the ground to commence? 

...my current immediate response--as of 11:20 this morning--is to mumble something about "excitement", "interest" and "learning something". So. Let's see if John Falk can convince me to make some kind of building that ain't triangular, because it's annoying to put furniture in a triangular building.

Already, I can think of several motivations for visiting a museum--some from Falk's book, some from my own experiences. (Blogger, if you don't chill out, I'm going to go insane.) For the sake of example, let's call the imaginary museum all these random motivations are driving people to "Whitehall Museum". It has a nice ring to it.

• "Your Aunt Mildred is visiting and if we don't plan an activity she'll spend the whole visit just talking about her cats and I can't take that so let's take her to the Whitehall Museum." 

• "John likes the types of things they have at Whitehall, such as the Egyptian artefacts on the poster. He'd be interested in going as a day trip. I'll suggest it on his day off." 

• "I've heard a lot about that new traveling exhibit at Whitehall. It's supposed to be really good. We don't have anything better to do, so let's go see it this Thursday." 

• "It's been raining for three weeks straight, I'm stir crazy, and if I don't get out of this house I will become an ax murderer. I don't care where we go, but I'd like it to be more wholesome than those stupid cartoons little Jacob and Jane have been watching this whole. freaking. time." 

• "There's nothing to do today. Let's go see the new IMAX film at Whitehall about dinosaurs invading the museum." 

Falk also seems to be getting at the question, "What about your museum would influence people to believe that they are better people for visiting?" He's also brought up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which makes me feel faintly queasy--I hate psychology, and it seems so dreadfully woolly, to quote Harry Potter.

Still, people visit museums to better themselves in some way. That makes sense. In the Whitehall examples above, they're trying to keep a good relationship with Aunt Mildred, to make John happy by showing appreciation of his interests, to entertain themselves and learn something in the process, to keep from killing their children, or to evade boredom with something more productive than staring at a wall or twiddling one's thumbs. Museum visits are leisure activities. In accordance with the Hierarchy of Needs, there's an even woolier hierarchy of leisure:

1. A search for diversion. What can I do to relax myself that will keep me busy? I can play video games, organise my bookshelf, call Aunt Mildred, bake bread, knit, etc. 
2. A search for pleasure. What can I do to relax myself that will keep me busy and is fun? This may or may not include things from 1, but might also include watching a movie, taking a nap, swimming, painting one's fingernails, listening to or playing music, etc.
3. A search for meaning. What can I do to relax myself that will also teach me something? Again, this might include a previous category as well, but can also include things like bible study, watching DIY videos, cooking something complicated and new, taking on a Project. 

A museum visit falls most completely into (3). 

It's also worth noting that, as I've read on, my Whitehall examples (which I made up before reading particularly far into the book) are essentially just more cynical/personalised versions of the example reasons for visiting Falk included in his text. Falk said people visit the LA Science Center--a real museum--for reasons such as

• the need to satisfy a personal curiosity and interest in an intellectually challenging environment;

• the wish to engage in a meaningful social experience with someone whom [the visitor] cares about in an educationally supportive environment;

• the aspiration to be exposed to things and ideas that exemplify what is best and intellectually what is most important within a culture or community;

• the desire to further specific intellectual needs in a setting with a specific subject matter focus; and/or 

• the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment. 

I'm dubious about the last one. PARI is a number of things, but I'm not entirely sure I'd call it some kind of spiritual centre. The museum itself is, by virtue of the 1970s gold carpeting alone, not exactly beautiful.

lookit that carpet. oh yeah. Stunning.

Still, those five categories Falk presented above group visitors into five different roles: 

1. The Explorer
2. The Facilitator
3. The Experience Seeker
4. The Professional/Hobbyist
5. The Recharger

Falk acknowledges that visitors most likely fit into multiple, if not all, categories in various ratios, but they make a way to get a handle on the types of people who came to visit the museum. It's a way of categorising visitor expectations.

I would, in conclusion for today's post, like to comment on a section heading from this book: Nailing jell-o to the wall. If the jell-o is sufficiently concentrated and the task is undertaken by somebody sufficiently determined, I reckon I could wallpaper this place in the stuff. I don't know why anybody would want to, however.

(Also, if anyone on the PARI staff is looking, we put those paintings downstairs. We'll move them if we have to, but please tell us where you want them, since the multimedia room was apparently a Bad Place. Cool?)