Abstract:
Museums, wishing to optimise the experience of various groups of visitors, use feedback surveys to assess opinions of their visitors, including their expectations before hand and considered view post-visit. Amongst key themes reported in these surveys are: the general success of a museum model which is quite comprehensive (including multiple themes and locations); the desirability of engaging visitors emotionally; and, in the case of groups, the importance of shared experience both during the visit and in post-visit digestion of the learning and the impression left by the experience. Technology emerges as an important vehicle to drive all these de-sired positive outcomes, the one currently indicating the most promise being personal mobile technology. In this paper, the authors discuss the issues which need to be considered in developing optimised museum experience for various target visitor groups, based around the application of this technology platform. As the basis for discussing how best to use such technology, the Contextual Learning Model of Falk and Storksdik (2005) is explored, which produces a set of parameters categorized as 'personal, sociocultural and material (physical) contexts'. After explaining the implications of each of these contexts, a detailed example of the implemen-tation of technology for the interpretation of one aspect of heritage is given – that of the interpretation of Chinese history for non-specialist foreign audiences using a comprehensive charting of the ebb and flow of the dynasties, styled by the present authors as DYNAMOST ™. This set of resources includes a range of personal mo-bile technology applications supported by live and recorded lectures and printed material. The authors finally consider the potential to apply this method more generally in order to assess 'How technology can influence museum visitor experience'
