Transforming Thresholds: Digital Media and Visitor Behaviour in Museum Foyers

In a time of austerity, it is vital that museums remove potential barriers and make their collections accessible to existing and new audiences. Foyers are significant, liminal spaces that constitute the visitor's first on-site engagement with the museum. However, they present problems in that they

(a) place complex demands on visitors in terms of conceptual, social and spatial orientation;
(b) are rarely curated in the same way as in-gallery spaces, and are contested sites for the museum to project its identity;
(c) have been neglected in academic research, and mentioned only tangentially (if at all) in museology, visitor studies, in work on intellectual scaffolding, semiotics and visualisation in museum contexts;
(d) challenge existing geo-mobile technological resources (such as GPS or RFID) used for tracking visitor behaviour;
(e) lack a clear, tested model for measuring visitor behaviour, and a policy to govern best practice for engagement and orientation in this space.

The central aim of the Transforming Thresholds Network is to bring together an international, interdisciplinary team with expertise in the textual, visual, spatial, curatorial and interpersonal uses of digital media, along with partners from retail, theatre, gaming, education, museums and galleries. Together, this ensemble will tackle the problem of visitor engagement in the foyer space by creating, testing and reviewing innovative digital forms of intellectual scaffolding in a range of museum contexts.

Traditionally, printed information (signs, map plans and leaflets) have been the principal means by which museums have provided orientation and information about their collections for visitors in foyers. Although digital technology has now developed so that off-site forms of interaction (via web pages) and in-gallery interactives have enabled increased audience engagement, these digital modes of interaction have rarely been applied creatively to the communication provided at the first point in which the visitor enters the museum: its foyer.

The 'Transforming Thresholds' Network builds on the work of Parry, Ortiz-Williams and Sawyer (2007) which pioneered the transformation of in-gallery printed labels to live, updateable digital labels. As one of the projects identified by the LIVE!Museum AHRC Network (Parry 2009-10), the Transforming Thresholds Network similarly seeks to explore the transformative potential of digital media, but focuses on a specific, under-used and under-researched museum context (the foyer) and a specific aspect of the visitors' experience (their need for intellectual scaffolding).

The Network will ask:

What are the core needs of visitors in foyer spaces, and how can digital media meet them?
How might models of digital engagement found in e-learning, gaming and retail transform the design of museum foyers and their signage?
How do we measure visitor behaviour in foyer spaces, and can digital technology help this process?
What access and institutional issues are raised or resolved by the use of digital forms of scaffolding?
How can we bridge offline and on-site forms of digital interaction?
What are the limits of digital media as a form of scaffolding?

The Network will hold a structured series of five residential workshops and creative encounters over two years, culminating in a public festival. Project activities focus on the following themes:

-existing practice and visitor needs;
-screen-based and mobile media forms of intellectual scaffolding;
-the limits of digital media and its relationship to the non-digital.

The findings of the Network will be communicated via a public website hosted by the West Midlands Digital Cultural Heritage Demonstrator, open access resources (made available by the Leicester Research Archive), social media platforms, and peer reviewed publications. A core objective of the Network is to generate at least one proposal for a future Knowledge Exchange research bid.

In guiding museums and galleries how to use digital technology to better design their foyer spaces to engage visitors, the Transforming Thresholds will benefit:

MUSEUMS

The range of museum partners involved in the Network (which vary in scale, focus, public/charitable status) ensures that the results of the activities are as widely transferable as possible. Museums will benefit from improved knowledge of
- visitors' behaviour,
- scaffolding strategies used in a range of parallel contexts, and
- emergent technologies appropriate to their needs,
all of which will inform the redesign of museum foyer spaces. For the partners involved in Network, we anticipate the impact of the findings to inform strategic decisions immediately following the end of the Network, and to extend to the redesign of museum foyers beyond the network (via the Case Studies) subsequently.

COMMUNITIES OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

Employing effective digital engagement is a central strategy for the museum sector as it moves forward into the twenty-first century. The findings of the network will help shape the guidelines which inform the use of digital media by museum practitioners and professionals. The Network will enrich existing communities of professional practice (e.g. the Museums Computer Group and Museum 3.0) by building new lines of enquiry with an interdisciplinary team of academics and commercial partners from a range of other sectors, and by modelling innovative collaborative working practices (via the Professional Development Webinar).

COMMERCIAL PARTNERS

The network benefits commercial partners (both established companies and SMEs) by
-opening up new markets for their products,
-enabling them to develop and refine technological tools and practices in response to visitor needs, and to gain access to fresh data about visitor behaviour in threshold spaces
-providing an opportunity to showcase their work to new audiences (via case studies), within the Network and beyond
-to facilitate dialogue with third sector and academic organisations, allowing commercial partners to express their informed evaluation of the emerging technologies to an influential audience.

AUDIENCES

Most importantly, the outputs of the network will benefit existing and new visitors to museums by increasing their avenues to feedback their experience and needs to museums, improving their access to museum collections and enabling better on-site engagement with museum spaces from the outset of their visit.