How to Design a Museum – The Long Read

Museums store some of our species’ greatest work, as well as impressive achievements by Mother Earth—they are places where we go to prepare to think great thoughts, and, occasionally to do a little high-powered pondering.

There’s been lots of research done on museum design because they’re public places to which scientists have pretty ready access—once they convince the management that their project is worthwhile.

Just thinking about what gets put into museums is pretty mind boggling.  They are really homes for entire cultures.  As we’ve covered several times, we chose to display in our homes the things that we think send positive messages about us, what’s important to us, what we’ve accomplished.  Do we prize, as a society, education and informed discussion, so the museum is being set up as an educational aid, for example?  Is the museum supposed to act as a giant clubhouse where we can hang out with our neighbours and build community spirit, for instance?  Or something else?  In its museums our societies set out to do the same thing.  Sometimes we chose items from other cultures for our museums.  We do this when the pieces added say something significant (at least to the decision makers) about us—for example, that an ancient culture valued fine art and we are sophisticated enough to not only also value fine art in general but also the art of the culture on display, you get the idea, museums’ contents link directly to the ideals our cultures value.

Many, many museums are also custom built to be museums, so it’s not just the stuff that ends up in them but also the form of the building itself that sends a message.  You can tell from fields away if a museum’s primary target is children or blue bloods interested in visiting their family’s former art, for instance.  Has a group decided that people should enter via an immense hall, reminiscent of an ancient cathedral (and ancient cathedrals can carry a lot of baggage) or a sleek, no nonsense hyper-modern front door?  What metaphors about power or beauty or something else do the space’s owners seem to be trying to invoke?  It all matters and nothing happens by chance when millions of dollars or whatevers are being spent—and the building itself can be seen as an exhibit itself, driving home the organization’s mission.

If museums are meant to commemorate a particular event, their design may need to consider the emotions linked to it.  If the event is likely to bring happy thoughts to mind, for example, because it celebrates a string of World Cup football victories, designers may decide to apply some of the lessons learned by stadium designers related to crowd control and evacuation, for instance.  When the event being memorialized through the museum is a tragedy, say a terrorist attack, visitors are likely to become more fragile as they remain in the space.  For example, at the 911 Museum in New York City, exhibits are easy to exit so that the space doesn’t become claustrophobic and so stress does not overwhelm visitors.

Museums are particularly interesting places to design because often their mission is complex and they’re presenting a range of different materials that can not only be a challenge to organize but even more of a challenge to effectively direct people to once we do.  Also, visitor attention tends to fall after we’ve been in the museum for about 45 minutes, which makes it that much harder for us to navigate through the space to desired destinations (or the exit).  If we can mentally refresh in the museum from time to time—by looking into a courtyard with even a few natural or water elements, for example, we have a better visit, we can gather more information, we get along better with fellow museum goers and staff, and we’re not as likely to get lost, for instance.

Being in a museum is itself a restorative experience (the same goes for zoos) as long as people have some idea of how they’re supposed to behave in a museum and what’s likely to happen there.  This means that going to a museum can have the same sort of mentally revitalizing effect as heading off to the forest, for example, and for many city dwellers, it’s easier to drop into a museum than a forest.  If you’re picking a museum for a Saturday visit based on its “restorative potential,” you should know that a museum packed to the gills with exhibits will be less restorative than one where there are fewer displays and little breaks every so often, for example, a corridor that must be traveled for a short distance before other exhibits are viewed.  For more information on how people can refresh mentally, read this article.

Because they are public places and often contain all sorts of valuable stuff, CCTV cameras often speckle the walls inside museums.  These cameras can result in people being more helpful to other people when they think someone may be watching the video feeds.  Seeing CCTV cameras creates the impression that a space must be dangerous (if it wasn’t, why would the cameras be in place), so hiding CCTV cameras can be a good idea—in spaces with very high value items (the room in The Tower of London that houses the crown jewels, for example), visible cameras don’t act as a deterrent, thieves and others up to no good know a space like the jewel room is being monitored.

If you’re going to an art museum to relax, or thinking of bring art into your own home, you’ll be interested to know that looking at figurative (or representational, this is art that is based on real objects) art is more relaxing than looking at modern/contemporary art (and there is blood pressure data collected in a museum, not a lab, to prove it), and its also preferred.

Research conducted in museums (much of which is applicable outside museums) has determined that:

• People tend to turn to turn right when they enter a space such as a gallery unless there is a very compelling reason not to (like a barricade or something that’s so compelling that they can’t look away to the left—so if you’re wondering how to arrange the furniture in your living room or where to put the signage at a bake sale, take note. Also, people tend to (alas) walk toward the exit of an exhibit space—this exiting combined with the turning to the right have a significant effect on which parts and how much of exhibits are seen. So, in summary, we enter a room, turn to the right, walk at the edge of the room, along the wall, and tend to leave at the first exit we come to, the first chance we get. We are extremely unlikely to backtrack.
• When people are at a museum, they walk toward the closest exhibit they see, so where exhibits are placed influences how people move through an area, from closest to closest. If there is a tie, with several exhibits seeming equally close, people move to the one they think is more attractive (ah, the good looking prevail again).
• In museum research has shown that people walk more slowly on carpeted surfaces than they do on uncarpeted, bare ones and also walk more quickly when the pace of any background sound is faster. If you’re trying to keep people from dawdling somewhere, rip out that carpet.
• We walk toward light (say toward a window at the end of a hall), warm colours, things that are moving/animated (whether they’re an animal or an object), landmarks, areas with people in them (unless there is already a crowd there), and things that are just plain big. Also, people prefer to stay on the main route through a space and not detour off of the main path through a space.  We also like to walk in a straight line.  You can use colour, animation, etc., to lead people through a space, to determine how they’re choose to travel through it.
• We also will generally keep walking on whatever sort of surface is underfoot unless we have a really compelling reason to make a change (see above for examples, but they include things such as not walking into walls or holes of appreciable size)—so if we’re walking on a carpeted surface we’ll pick a route through a space so we can remain on it, we won’t wander off into the nearby hardwood floor. If you have two routes from your front door to your kitchen, you’ll encourage your kids in their muddy shoes to avoid the route through your living room if you put down hardwood there and the front hall and the alternate route are tiled.
• When travel routes through a museum intersect at other than 90 degrees we’re less likely to be able to understand how a museum is laid out.
• When art is in a larger hall/space it seems more important and maybe make it seem more sublime, evaluations are more personal in smaller spaces/ones with lower ceilings and these smaller spaces are the best sorts of spaces to display smaller pieces of art—choose the space where you hang your child’s art accordingly. And just in case you think any of this stuff is too objectively determined—we think a painting is larger when it’s reported as done by a master (as opposed to a student) and increasing the size of a painting tends to make it seem better and just attributing a painting to a master makes it seem better.  If a painting is hung higher than eye level it is judged better than when it is shown at eye level and when it is hung below eye levels it is felt to be worse.
• When we’re walking along, looking at art, we spend more time looking at the pieces we come to earlier than we do later ones.
• Warm colours in artworks will appear most vibrant in warm colored lighting while a piece of art featuring cooler colors makes a great impression in cooler light.
• Many pieces of art are presented as purely visual experiences, but physical art can generate other sensory experiences—some pieces of art can be touched as well as seen, for example, and others may have an intended scent as well as a visual form.
• Being in a museum or just looking at the building that houses a museum can be awe-inspiring; we can feel awed because of both the architecture of the museum and the exhibits in it—the same goes for your home and the objects you choose to put in it. We can be awed in a number of ways, from being in a space that is large, like the inside of a cathedral, to viewing something that is large, made of rare materials, unique in a positive way, or that exhibits extraordinary workmanship, for example.  When people are awed, they are more likely to act in ways that benefit others, are more likely to have an open mind, are less stressed, process information more effectively, and think more creatively, for example, as discussed in this article on awe.
• Lots of people like to take selfies of themselves with museum exhibits (“arties”) and a great challenge for many museums today is to keep the people taking arties, the people traveling through a space, and the people who’ve stopped to focus on an exhibit from tripping over each other.