Museums today find themselves in the need to change, to open up for and to integrate current social cultural themes, conflicts and developments and to open up a space for their audience to experience their own life reality, their life interests and challenges with those of the museum and mediated by the exhibits.
This makes museum and exhibition practice directly interrelated with audience reception and impact processes and structures. Both are embedded in the larger context of what we call “impact unit” which are co-determined by the current cultural societal dynamics and issues.
To create relevance in terms of psychology means to enable visitors to experience the museum as a holistic impact room as a sheltered and open room to mediate their life interests with the interests of art and to experience relevant, dramatic and lively situation. Art can mediate life issues, conflicts and solution strategies – if the audience manages to enter an extensive reception process.
Audience research from a psychology approach at its core is reception- and impact-driven research. It looks at the process of what people go through and how they go about e.g. a specific museum and exhibition.
Working from reception means to put the process, the experience and the impact into the center.
Reception is a dynamic consciously and unconsciously happening dialogue process that people go through all the time in daily life and daily life culture.
A psychology approach allows for including the larger ensemble of factors present at the location co-impacting the exhibits to be part of the experience and impact evaluation. This is especially the architecture and room layout-driven atmosphere, the social interaction style, the exhibition format and individual design and the presentation of the exhibits and so on.
Psychology understands the dynamics of the overall reception process while being present, the journey visitors make and in a second step analyses the empirical material along the psycho-morphological theory.
With artwork and other exhibits however, often the frame of reference or the “how to” is not learned, they exceed practical functionality, fun or established story patterns. Our findings show it’s much less disinterest that make people quickly walk by the many exhibits, but a lack of tools to select, approach and manage the offer.
Because of this tying back to today’s societal and daily-life cultural practices, themes and “narratives” of sense-making is becoming a critical issues of museum involvement. The question is how the contemporary societal image cultures relate to and integrate to the museums’ image cultures.