The Study from Which this Model Emerged

The Instructional Role of Museums

Many consider public education to be the most significant contribution this country [the United States] has made to the evolution of the museum concept...Long before the Tax Reform Act of 1969 officially designated museums as educational institutions, American museums embraced the notion that they should communicate the essence of ideas, impart knowledge, encourage curiosity and promote esthetic sensibility. (Bloom and Powell, 1984,p. 55).

As educational institutions, museums have had a profound impact on their visitors. Csikzentmihalyi & Hermanson note that "one often meets successful adults, professionals, or scientists who recall that their life-long vocational interest was first sparked by a ... museum [exhibit]" (1995, p. 35).

But how do museum exhibit designers achieve this impact? Designing museum exhibits--that is, three-dimensional spaces that present information and ideas to the general public and from which this public, called visitors, can learn information and change attitudes--presents many challenges to museum professionals.

Some of the challenges evolve outside the museum environment. Museums must compete with other cultural and entertainment venues for people who visit.

Some of the challenges facing exhibit designers result directly from the museum environment. Csikzentmihalyi and Hermanson note that "well known physical distractions include crowds, noise, intimidating guards, hunger, bladder pressure, and fatigue" (1995, p. 59).

But the bulk of the challenges facing people who design exhibits are instructional. One is the medium of communication. Schools and training classes primarily teach through words; museum exhibits primarily teach through the objects (Falk, Koran, & Dierking, 1986). This is called object-based learning (Bloom & Powell, 1984).

A second instructional challenge pertains to information. Although museums teach through objects, museum professionals are keenly aware that they present objects out of their original context. For example, how can visitors to a technology museum truly appreciate an early computer outside of the work environment in which people used it and without physically attempting the tasks replaced by the computer?

A third--and most pressing--instructional challenge pertains to the voluntary nature of the museum experience. In formal educational settings, such as schools, universities, and corporate training courses, students are usually required to participate. They are evaluated on how well they have learned the subject, often in comparison to other students. In contrast, museum visitors participate voluntarily; they choose to visit museums (Csikzentmihalyi & Hermanson, 1995). They are not evaluated on what they learned. Many visitors do not even visit museums for educational purposes; they visit museums for social reasons and entertainment (Hood & Roberts, p.36-44).

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The Questions Guiding this Study

When addressing these instructional challenges, museum exhibit designers often employ educational theories and technologies. The interest in developing an understanding of the unique challenges of museum exhibit design, how designers respond to them, and how those challenges and responses compare with those faced by instructional designers guided this study. Looking at instructional design outside of more traditional instructional design environments, such as schools and corporations, might also offer insights into instructional design performed in those environments.

Specifically, the following questions guided this study:

1. How do museum staffs design exhibits?
2. How do museum staffs make decisions during the design process?
3. Of those design criteria, what role does education play?
4. How does the museum exhibit design process compare to the instructional design process?

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Methods

I entered the environment with my own opinions about museum exhibit design. But those are the opinions of someone trained in instructional design. What do the people who design museum exhibits think? I could not assume that they were trained in instructional design or share my beliefs about the field. This difference in beliefs could have stemmed from differences in occupational cultures. According to Trice and Beyer, an occupation is a group of workers who have "exclusive right to perform certain kinds of work, to control training for the access to doing that work, and to control the way work is performed" (1993, p. 186). They add that "the access to knowledge that is intrinsic to the performance of tasks is the fundamental basis for occupational control over the conduct of work" (p. 188).

When members of one culture, such as instructional design, study people in another culture, such as museum exhibit design, they bring with them a set of assumptions based on their own naiveté of the other culture, such as the language others should be expected to know and values that others are expected to have. The assumptions might be inappropriate. In addition to providing a means of answering the guiding questions, therefore, the research method chosen also needed to provide a means for addressing the cultural assumptions that I as researcher brought into the study and help me understand the context from which the culture under study emerged.

Besides addressing these needs, the methodology should lead to conclusions that are rooted in practice. As Wedman and Tessmer note at the end of their exploration of the use of instructional design principles in practice by instructional designers

They add

The grounded theory methodology, developed by Glaser and Strauss, best addressed these needs (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

In this study, I explored the design process used by core exhibit design teams at 3 science, history, and technology museums for one permanent exhibition at each of the sites. Core exhibit design teams have overall responsibility for designing, developing, and installing an exhibition. When feasible, I included peripheral members of the design team. Peripheral team members support the core team with specialized skills, such as preservation of objects and construction of cases. I limited the sites to museums that communicated technical content, such as science, technology, and history museums. Then, I chose the sites for the breadth of their staff experience, locations, and subject matter. Specifically, I studied the design of these exhibitions:

• "Without Boundaries," an exhibition at the Urban History Museum about the growth of the large Southeastern city in which it is located.
• "Network Earth," an exhibition about the human impact of computer networks at The High Tech Museum, which is located in a large Northeastern city.
• "The Canning Factory," an exhibition that simulates work in an oyster canning factory during the late nineteenth century at The Industrial History Museum, which is located in a mid-Atlantic city.

Consistent with naturalistic research methods, the names of the museums and exhibits have been changed to protect the privacy of each informant.

I collected data came from a series of interviews with design team members; observations of design meetings; and analyses of source documents about exhibits, including exhibition plans, descriptions of exhibit design processes, grant applications, and materials intended for visitors. The data were analyzed using a three-step process described by Strauss and Corbin: (1) open coding, (2) axial coding, and (3) selective coding.

The results were presented to a group of instructional designers for their reactions. The trustworthiness of the data is assured through triangulation--the use of multiple methods and multiple sources of data--and through an audit. The auditor reviewed transcripts from interviews and reported that the reporting was complete and that the resulting conclusions are consistent with the data.

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(c) Copyright. 1998. Saul Carliner. All rights reserved.