Observing, recording, visualising and interpreting visitors’ movement patterns in art museums: A mixed method approach

Abstract

While it may seem obvious that visitors to an art museum move through exhibition space to see exhibits, understanding the corollaries of this movement is less so. Such an understanding requires using various complementary methodologies to observe, record, visualise and interpret visitors’ movement options. This paper is a systematic review of some long-standing methodologies and analytical tools developed within the field of visitor studies and spatial syntax as well as recent ones engendered from theories and concepts of wayfinding, Systemic Functional Linguistics, film and perception. The selected methodologies proved useful in a larger empirical study to account for the dynamic aspect of visitors’ movement patterns in exhibition space. While previous methodologies demonstrated that the placement of objects, particularly labels, influences movement patterns, newer methodologies elucidated that many movement options are not selected by the visitor, resulting in distorted views of artworks. The findings in this paper may have practical implications for curators, who might reconsider their curatorial designs to enable more movement choices and avoid these distortions, and for spatial discourse analysts, who may use some of the methodologies to undertake a finer-grained analysis of the built-environment, one which includes observing users’ movement patterns in relation to seeing.