These directions in museum visiting research and exhibition design can also be seen in
many other areas, including design research and media research; as well as the growth of
research on consumption which spans a wide range of disciplines. The shift from ‘effects’
to ‘affect’ is another way of characterising the shift; although, as with the possible
misconception involved in referring to ‘meaning-making’ noted above, there is a risk that
‘affect’ is understood too narrowly to refer to an unconscious stimulus-response that is
unmediated by social and cultural differentiation. Rather than separating out ‘affective
communication’, then, this might—and perhaps should—be seen as an integral and
unavoidable aspect of communication tout court; a position that is suggested by Ruth
Finnegan’s arguments for a broad approach to communication that is not restricted to
the cognitive or linguistic but also includes the embodied and emotional (Finnegan 2002).
Communication, however, entails the transmission of some kind of meaning between
different parties, and therefore perhaps does not fully capture study of the structure of
visitor knowledge and experience, although Finnegan’s notion of ‘interconnecting’ seems
to allow this too. In other words, it seems to capture something of the notion of ‘ways of
knowing’ that has been used in anthropology and the history of science and medicine (e.g.
Pickstone 2000), although without over-emphasising the cognitive. Interconnecting is
concerned more broadly with ‘ways of relating’, which nicely incorporates attention to
ways in which visitors ‘assemble’ impressions and ideas, and considering how these
interconnect with the exhibition design and other aspects of their lives. This
characterisation also has potential to recognise that the experience of an exhibition is
not necessarily temporally confined to the time that a visitor is actually in an exhibition
but extends beyond this, especially into its relating afterwards (Falk et al. 2006)