Affective communication: towards the personalisation of a museum exhibition

Abstract

Affective communication is a key element in the design of museum exhibitions to engage with visitors and so enhance their visit experience. Museums are examples of what Augé refers to as non-places. He asserts that non-places, such as museums, supermarkets and airports, provide people with different experiences (when compared with experiences in anthropological places) because people in a non-place are a collection of solitary individuals (as opposed to a social group), each of whom typically interacts with the non-place using written text and narratives. This inevitably affects each individual experience of the non-place. Personalisation is a strategy used in the production of consumer goods to tailor products to suit the needs of individual consumers. This paper explores the use of personalisation as a design strategy that might be used to improve affective communication between an exhibition and individual visitors. Early results of research using personalisation technologies to provide museum visitors with personalised journeys through an exhibition space are presented. Key similarities and differences between the personalisation of exhibition visits and consumer products are highlighted. In the longer term, it is anticipated that learning from this research could be applied to other non-places, such as supermarkets, the products that occupy them and the way in which such products are presented to consumers.

Keywords:

• Customisation
• Personalisation
• Non-place
• Design
• Products
• Exhibitions

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper has resulted from the author's participation in the UK EPSRC funded Network for Affective Communication in Consumer Product and Exhibition Design with colleagues from the Royal Armouries in Leeds and the White Rose University consortium. The “My Exhibition-Designing for Affective Communication” project is an AHRC/EPSRC Designing for the 21st Century project.

Notes

^†“My Exhibition – Designing for Affective Communication, Personalisation and Social Experience”, an AHRC/EPSRC Designing for the 21^st Century project.

^‡The Royal Armouries at Leeds: www.royalarmouries.org

^§‘Shogun—The Life of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu’, A Royal Armouries (Leeds) exhibition, Summer 2006.