I'm really going to have a difficult time finding one experience in a museum, or even one museum to call a favorite. I can easily think of "significant" museums in my life.
I had some great early experiences as a kid- when I was young enough not to remember which came first. I remember going to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was (and still is) a great science and technology museum. They still have one of the exhibits I remember well-- I realistic human heart thousands of times bigger than life-size. As you can see from their website, the two-storey tall heart would be right-sized for a 220' tall person. I remember climbing the stairs inside the heart, going from chamber to chamber, up an aorta and down a ventricle. All the time, there was a beating coming from the walls. Lub-dub, lub-dub.
(I don't know if the recent renovation shrunk the heart, but it doesn't look like two stories here: click here. But the site still says it is. http://www2.fi.edu/exhibits/permanent/giant-heart.php. Eat your heart out (yikes) if you are interested in the teachers' guide and so on.
The other exhibit they had was a supercomputer- back when it was a huge lurking thing. The computer seemed to be mini-bus sized, surrounded by a countertop behind which sat some number of experts. I'm not ancient, but this was definitely in the era of punch cards. At any rate, the idea was that kids could ask the supercomputer (through the experts) "any" question in the world, and it would give the answer. The computer experts would feed in the answer, and you'd come back in 10 minutes (or was it more?) and you'd have an answer. Sadly, I remember not getting an impressive answer. It was something like reading a fortune cookie. I suppose my question was changed into something the computer would be able to make sense out of, and the answer was either too generic or too erudite for my understanding. Or both.
Closer to home was an art museum that I visited both with my parents and school. I really don't remember any paintings or sculptures from the Renaissance to 19th c-- there must have been plenty of that, though. I remember one school trip where we visited a hands-on exhibit designed for kids where they had lots of forms and materials to interact with. Somehow, this became a really deep memory for me. I also remember some modern paintings where the media used were blood, mud, grease and the like. That was a big revelation to me, although I didn't think I was an artist. Or should I say, in elementary school, one of the unofficial messages that came across in my classrooms was that gifts were apportioned differently, and that a few girls were the artists and I was ... not. There was also a series of really cool sculptures that looked a little bit like cattails mounted on a heavy metal base. They were tall, and swayed a little on their flexible stalks. The base held a square amount- like 36, or 49- I forget. Anyway, as they swayed and hit each other, they would make a fantastic deeply resonating ringing sound.
Much later, I went to work in a natural history museum-- quite a unique place. Not only was it a 'museum of a museum', but it was also a rich educational resource in the middle of one of Philadelphia's toughest areas.
So I've spent a lot of time thinking about learning in museums. What did I learn in the heart? I don't think I learned many facts. Maybe I picked up some words, and it's likely I got some idea of the gist of chambers and so on. But I think I also got the idea that built spaces could be cool, expressive of some educational or inspirational aim, and not just utilitarian like a classroom, a kitchen, a car.
I also think that the learning I got from some of those early exhibits fed my intuition rather than my IQ. I can't imagine a measure you could have designed before and after tests to measure the impact of the chocolate/grease/mud paintings. Sure you could get the facts, but how would you see how much it had opened my imagination? How could you know if that had some effect on my desire to also create experiences of "surprise and delight" as L.Leifer says?
YH: Hey Mark, I definitely agree with you on the point that whether it's a good idea to design some kind of measure to quantify the learning visitors got from their museum visits. Like what you described in your visits to the various museums, some people may not recall any particular facts or scientific principles learned but whose imagination was fired up or was inspired or motivated to find out more about something after their visit. Surely, that must count as a successful museum experience too.
Elizabeth: I love the moment in your reflection when you go back to look at the heart, even via a website, and find it doesn't seem as big now as it did before. I've had the same experience going into cathedrals and even houses that seemed enormous when I was a kid and are diminished now by virtue of the fact that I'm taller and have many more experiences to compare them with. I also appreciated your comment during the discussion that seeing the heart opened your eyes not just to the workings of the organ, but moreso to the possibilities of design, of imagining what's possible. It is hard to believe that seeing paintings of blood could delight anyone, child or adult, but it would certainly be an eye-opening and mind-opening experience.
Jason Weeby So what do you think the function of a museum is? To build knowledge? To elicit wonder? To prepare for the future? To transmit culture? To inspire creation? Of course you could say that all museums have different directives and the ones that try to accomplish them all are watered down. There is also a high risk of falling into relativism with this question so maybe it is a bad one. I certainly don't have an answer. But it begs the question of purpose for the designer. Doesn't it?
Mark responds: Thanks, Yeong Haur, Elizabeth, and Jason for the good feedback and questions. (Am I done now? Just kidding)
For YH, I find myself both wanting to measure what the take aways are, and being dissatisfied with the current options for doing so. I think it's because when I say measure I don't mean only a numerical, reductionist, score of knowledge-as-possession. Rather, I think some of the takeaways can (also) be measured in narrative form. I'm not a relativist about this-- I don't think that everyone's takeaway is so different that we'll never know anything meaningful. But I do think the impacts of museums are complex, and that designs have both intentional and unintentional consequences.
Now, of course, one thing that reveals unintentional "learnings" (and "failures to learn") is the act of prototyping.
Elizabeth, yes- about the heart and cathedrals. I remember also going back to my beloved first grade teacher's room when I was maybe in eighth grade and wondering who had shrunk the chairs, the closets, the coat racks. And yet, even though some of these physical spaces seem smaller, there are still some places that retain a 'sense of wonder' for me.
Jason- I'm not sure I think all museums are easily lumped together with one purpose. Especially after reading tomorrow's piece about the exploratorium (etc), it seems that it's hard to lump the exploratorium into the same category as a museum that is really based on a fairly static collection (whether natural history or art or whatever). The exploratorium has as its whole purpose to engineer learning experiences in science (although as the article points out, some kinds of science work better than others); a collections-based museum not only cares for/preserves the collection, but also wants to teach about it. And that includes certain core facts, I would think. (How can you learn about rodin's sculpture w/o knowing a few things about Rodin or france or calais?). I think I'll write more on this in reaction to the paper. But in any case, I think 1) it's hard to have a unified definition of a museum, and therefore of museum learning; and 2) that's okay and 3) I'm not a relativist.
Thanks, all, for reading my stuff!
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