Why Visiting a Museum Exhibition is More like Taking a Hike than Reading a Book
Too often, I see that exhibitions are developed in a way that assumes visitors will experience them like a book. However, results from hundreds of summative exhibition evaluations tells me that visiting an exhibition is more analogous to taking a hike than reading a book. Here are four ways museum visitors experience exhibitions like hikes rather than like books.
1. Visiting an exhibition, like taking a hike, is often a social shared experience in an out-of-the ordinary setting
Like hikes, many museum visitors’ number one motivation for visiting a museum is to spend time with friends and family in extraordinary locations—someplace out of their normal routine— to create a shared experience. Reading a book is a much more solitary activity; moments of discovery when reading a passage of a book are not typically shared moments of discovery. Whereas on a hike or in a museum exhibition, moments of discovery are frequently shared– we look at paintings or artifacts alongside other people, just like we take in an expansive view or interesting rock formation on a hike with others.
2. While hiking or walking through an exhibition, our attention is diffuse with spurts of focus
In museums, as on hikes, visitors’ attention is pulled in multiple directions. Hikers and visitors are often in a new place and taking in their new surroundings while simultaneously attending to the people around them. Museum visitors and hikers tend to try to “take it all in at once,” and their attention is scattered in multiple directions. Hikers may pause and focus intently if a hike requires attention to scale a rocky incline or they notice a bird in a tree, just like museum visitors may pause to read a label of an object that has caught their attention. But that kind of focus is interspersed with moments of wandering and looking around. Diffuse attention is a totally different way of being in the world as compared to the kind of focused attention that comes with reading a book. When reading, our attention is directed at one small page of words and our own internal thoughts, where it is easy to lose touch with our surroundings.
3. Hiking and visiting an exhibition are both embodied and sensorial experiences
Hiking and museum visits are physical experiences. Both require movement from one place to another place. Both compete for our senses through sounds, visual stimuli, and sometimes smell or touch. Hiking and visiting an exhibition place demands on our bodies in ways that books don’t. Reading a book is a sedentary activity that takes place primarily in our minds and of our imaginations.
4. Hikers and museum visitors are often seeking a payoff
Museum visitors and hikers are often motivated similarly to experience something extraordinary that they would not normally experience in everyday life. While books can do this for people as well, what makes hikes and exhibitions distinct is there is often some kind of payoff moment being sought. For hikers, this might be the view at the summit of their hike or following the sound of rushing water to get to a waterfall. For museum visitors, this might be seeing a T. rex or a Picasso. Being in the presence of something so far outside our usual experience can spur an almost tangible connection to something bigger than ourselves–to humanity, to nature, to the past. In museums, we often call these moments of awe and wonder.
In the end, of course, every individual is unique and will experience books, hikes, and museum exhibitions in their own way. Some people read books as part of a book club for that shared experience. Some people hike alone as a meditative practice. And some people in museum exhibitions read and attend to nearly all of the labels and objects. But as a rule of thumb, visitors to exhibitions ping pong through the space, talk with others in their group about what they see, become distracted or fatigued, and look for that “must-see” object. Thinking about museum visits like hikes instead of books can be a helpful metaphor in the development of exhibitions.
