In a recent discussion of the development of museum visitor studies, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill notes that there has been a broad shift from ‘thinking about visitors as an undifferentiated mass public to beginning to accept visitors as active interpreters and performers of meaning-making practices within complex cultural sites’ (2006, p. 362). She
also notes that there have been shifts away from models based in behaviourist psychology and ‘expert-to-novice . . . communication’ (ibid.) and, especially over the last ten years,
towards what she calls an ‘interpretative paradigm’ (ibid.). Thus, she reports, many of the earlier studies were oriented to questions of whether the public had managed to grasp the expert information provided to them in the exhibition or not. The visitor was
conceptualised as a more or less absorbent sponge encountering the expert knowledge
provided by the museum; and in museums of science and natural history in particular,
exhibitions were often evaluated on the basis of how effective they were in transmitting
factual knowledge to those who visited (see Lawrence 1991 for a robust critique). Within
such a model, design was seen as important for ‘packaging messages’ and so helping to
‘get them across’ the expert – visitor divide. Within a more ‘interpretative paradigm’,
however, design is recognised more fully as an integral part of the visitor experience, with
potentially more far-reaching implications for structuring the very nature of that
experience rather than simply providing a more or less attractive medium for presenting
content.