Front-End Study of The Concord Museum’s Why Concord? Exhibition
Client: The Concord Museum | Location: Concord, MA | Funding: Institute for Museum and Library Services
We led a front-end evaluation to help inform the Concord Museum's reinstallation and reinterpretation of its permanent exhibition gallery—Why Concord?
OVERVIEW
In 2017, we partnered with The Concord Museum to assess the current visitor experience in their permanent exhibition, Why Concord?, and to explore visitors’ responses to preliminary ideas for updating, reinterpreting, and reinstalling the exhibition.
Our work was pivotal in helping The Concord Museum understand what its visitors find relevant about history and make audience-centered decisions for the reinstallation.
APPROACH
We took an semi-structured, exploratory approach to allow visitors to share their experiences in the current exhibition as well as their reactions to the proposed ideas for reinterpretation.
Over a few days at the museum, we invited visitors to explore the current Why Concord? exhibition for 30 minutes and take pictures of the exhibition’s objects and period rooms that stood out to them. We then interviewed them about their experience and photographs, showed them materials related to the proposed reinterpretation of the exhibition to gauge their reactions, and spoke with them about how history is (or isn’t) relevant to their lives.
CLIENT TAKEAWAYS
We found that visitors particularly valued the current exhibition as an authentic opportunity to immerse themselves in the history of a particular place—Concord, Massachusetts. We also identified compelling objects and subjects such as artifacts related to Concordian transcendentalist authors, period rooms presenting daily life in Concord over time, and themes that made connections between Concord’s history and issues in the world today (e.g., race relations, immigration, political discord, and nature preservation).
Significantly, our evaluation affirmed one of the museum’s goals for reinterpretation, connecting the past to the present, and revealed some potential barriers to engagement. For instance, while visitors were open to technology, they hoped technology would be used to enhance their understanding of historical figure’s daily lives, not replace real objects.
