Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums change. As sensitive organisms, they modify their priorities and relations between visitor-institution and visitor-collection. Museums are no longer only challenged to preserve their collection, but to make it available to visitors, and pretty unpredictable their tastes and choices about tomorrow. Moreover, technologies inside museums have introduced new time dimensions and new exhibit paradigms with high sensory engagement. A real case history - the meta-design project by Politecnico di Milano for the new Etruscan Museum in Milano - is the focus of this study. Seeing the audience as flesh and blood, and taking them into account, not as numbers of statistics and widespread dimensional analysis on museum consumption, but as people, with their own individual faces and souls, we has reflected on three main questions: What is the Etruscan Museum message? Who are its Visitors? How does the narration emerge? Following these research questions, we create two multi-purpose and orientation tools, useful for both the Institutions and the Designers: 1) a new method of analysis, cataloguing, and investigating not only knowledge (content) but mainly the cognitive process (how knowledge is acquired) that comes to life during multimedia experiences; 2) an experimental methodological redesigning of the visitor experience. Personas, and their polarities, are hybridized with new motivation clusters, in order to imagine four different visitors’ behavioral modalities (explorer, atmospheric, collector, self-satisfied). The new Etruscan Museum in Milan is going beyond the usual reductive distinction between experts and non-experts.