Understanding Visitor Experience in the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s “Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond” Exhibition

Experience Design Research
Written By Cathy Sigmond

Client: Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center | Location: Washington, DC

 
 

We helped the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center understand visitor experience in its first museum exhibition in a decade, providing essential insights into this onsite experience and their audience more broadly.

OVERVIEW

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC) opened its first museum exhibition in a decade—Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond—in September 2024 with a residency at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). APAC was highly curious to understand how visitors experienced this new, thematically-organized and history-forward exhibition in the context of a national art museum. Moreover, APAC was eager to use the evaluation as an opportunity to get to know its onsite audiences better.

APPROACH

 We designed a multi-method summative evaluation of Sightlines: 

  • An exit survey to understand visitors’ characteristics, motivations, perceptions, and curiosities about the exhibition and about APAC

  • Timing and tracking observations to understand visitor behavior in the exhibition, such as time spent overall, stops made, and time spent in specific areas of the exhibition, as well as other visitor behaviors.

CLIENT TAKEAWAYS

The summative evaluation revealed that many visitors had engaging and meaningful, albeit brief, experiences in the exhibition. When asked to pick from a list of words and phrases describing the Sightlines exhibition, visitors most often described it as “interesting,” “unique,” and “important,” and they appreciated how Sightlines intertwined history, culture, and art in interesting and surprising ways, especially in the context of a national art museum. Timing and tracking observations found that time spent in the exhibition overall was low, but visitors stopped in many areas of the exhibition and came away with some (but not all) of Sightlines’ main messages.

In short, APAC’s experiment of presenting a history-forward exhibition in an art museum was well received. It struck the right balance of being conscious of its context (an art museum) and meeting some of visitors’ expectations for an art museum experience by presenting a strong artistic presence, while also pushing beyond those expectations to surprise visitors with engaging history and cultural context. Moving forward with future exhibitions, we encouraged APAC to keep in mind the limited time they have with visitors—especially in a small gallery at a large, national museum—when thinking about what big ideas they want to make sure all (or most) visitors encounter and what design techniques might get them there.

Cathy Sigmond

Cathy brings many years of experience in education and experience design to her role as Head of Strategy at Kera Collective. 

Having previously worked in a variety of educational settings, Cathy is driven by her constant fascination and delight at how people make discoveries about the familiar and the unfamiliar. 

Cathy loves helping to shape experiences that spark curiosity and make a difference in people’s lives. She particularly enjoys the rapid, iterative nature of design-based research and the deep insights that come from qualitative research, especially on projects exploring interactions with the digital and built environments. 

Cathy shares her passion for experience design research widely and regularly guest lectures for graduate programs, including the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Exhibition and Experience Design Program and the Pratt Institute’s School of Information. Cathy served as the co-chair of the Museum Computer Network’s Human-Centered Design special interest group from 2018-2021.

Outside of work, you can usually find Cathy playing soccer, thrifting, or making her way through her large cookbook collection. 

Cathy’s favorite museum experiences are immersive; she will always vividly remember walking through the giant heart at the Franklin Institute, being surrounded by birds at the Peabody Essex Museum, and hearing centuries-old instruments come to life at the Museum of Musical Instruments. 

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