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Pamela Erskine-Loftus, PhD erskineloftus@hotmail.com Rethinking Museum Display International Conference 12-15 December 2013 National Museum Bahrain T ITLE: Museums in Context: the communication of ‘place’ in exhibitions ABSTRACT: Based on the understanding that museum exhibitions, their design and methods of display, are a form of communication, this presentation will examine the impact of gallery design for visitors, and their possibilities for engagement and learning, in relation to culture and the development of museums in the Gulf. Western museum gallery design has developed based on western social and cultural understandings, aspects of which are rarely questioned and often thought to be universally understood, however these may have quite different meanings and understandings to visitors of other cultures. Through an examination of the growth of museums in the Gulf States, and their use of western display practices, this presentation will highlight some of the cultural communication aspects that may hinder and limit opportunities for visitor engagement and learning. This discussion will show that aspects related to senses, preferred methods of communication, and particularly non-verbal communication, play an important role in the engagement of visitors in - and with - a museum. Local cultural aspects and understandings play an important role, possibly a decisive one, in the use (or not) of museums by citizens and regional tourists in the Gulf, and this has a direct effect on their future sustainability. PRESENTATION NOTES WITH SELECT PREZI SLIDES: Good morning! Most often museums are thought of as places and spaces, which collect, research and exhibit the past. However I am going to start today by talking about the future, and specifically the idea of ‘future think’. The study of ‘future think’ aspects is called Futures Studies,

• Also referred to as Futurism or Strategic Foresight, • And this is defined as being to postulate possible, probable, and preferable futures.

Some of the leading research centers for Futures Studies are universities in the Denmark, Finland, Taiwan and USA. The use of Strategic Foresight has stared to be used by museums—seen particularly in the work of

• Center for the Future of Museums and their annual TrendsWatch report • And the New Media Consortium’s yearly Horizon Report > Museums—a global report detailing near-, mid-, and

far-horizon technologies and their implications for museums. Strategic Foresight research has suggested three global Forces of Momentum for the future, which are all highly applicable and informative to museum exhibitions and display: Firstly, Globalization and specifically:

• The expansion of the third space, those spaces we seek out between the private and the official - between home and work, between home and school - in other words civic society.

• Changes in the traditional western-centric binary from Western:Other to Other:Other.

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• And the strong emergence—economically and culturally—of BRIC countries = Brazil, Russia, India, China. Secondly, Momentums in Education and Learning relating to:

• The emerging and growing era of the learner (as opposed to the prior era of the institution). • And therefore the multiple places where learning can take place and which are understood socially and culturally

as learning spaces—the cultural and social acceptance that schools and universities are not the only sites for learning.

And thirdly, aspects within Media and Communication, including:

• The emerging web of things – world of web connected embedded people and objects (current examples would be smart buildings).

• And our own identity curation through the social media interaction we undertake and how we present ourselves via media of all kinds.

These momentums are global however how they manifest themselves will be—and it can be argued should be—different depending on location. • Just as museums and museum practice is—and should be—different depending on location. • Hopefully the manifestations of these aspects will be based on the merging of these future momentums and the social

and cultural actualities of each place. • It is this understanding of the social and cultural aspects within the museum—the importance of the understanding of

‘place’—and what they may mean for exhibitions and design which I’d like to address today.

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Much of the current work on identity curation revolves around social media and how we present ourselves online. • However how people curate their identity—and where they choose to share it—is much broader and older than

social media. Museums, and particularly national, heritage and history museums, have been contributing to identity curation for quite some time. With the growth of museums worldwide this practice has only proliferated.

The growth of museums in the Gulf States over the last few decades shows the significant growth of museums as places for both the era of the learner and informal education, as well as identity curation.

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Though the first museums in the Gulf States were private now—by percentage—government run institutions account for close to 70% of museums – as shown in yellow in the ‘Museum governance’ chart.

Indeed, even with the number of different types of museums now open to the public across the Gulf States national, history and heritage museums still make up a large percentage of museums—about 60% of the current total.

• It is not just what museums collect which informs identity curation but also how those objects and collections are exhibited and displayed.

The manifestation of the museum that has spread from the west is the one that is prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula.

• This version of the museum—which is not the only version—has brought with it the majority of its western understandings of display and interpretation, as well as expectations and presumptions of audiences.

Western museum gallery design has developed based on western social and cultural understandings,

• Aspects of which are rarely questioned and which often are seen as natural to the museum, and therefore thought to be universally understood.

• However these may have quite different meanings and understandings to visitors of other cultures. Display, it has been argued, is a museum’s primary form of communication.

• Yet for the most part how museums communicate through display is not questioned. The communication between design and visitor has, like all forms of communication, a basis in culture,

• Which therefore means that what is culturally understood in one place will not be the same in other parts of the world.

Display communication consists of multiple visual messages, and is part of our wider non-verbal communication world

• A world where more of our communication is non-verbal: between 60 and 90%. • However, just as with verbal communication—with multiple languages, regional or cultural specificities, and the

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possibility for loss or misunderstanding in translation—non-verbal communication is also far more specific and culturally shaped than we account for.

The study of the variations of non-verbal communication across and within cultures, referred to as cross-cultural communication theory, has grown considerably over the last 10-15 years, incorporating aspects of phycology, anthropology, linguistics, communications and cultural studies. There are aspects of cross-cultural communication theory that have received considerable coverage,

• Increasingly in the areas of international business, • Including the understandings of body language, posture, eye contact, expressions and gestures, • These are less important to museums - though clearly not irrelevant - than some other aspects.

What is particularly useful to museums about cross-cultural communication theories is that they create what is called a 'cultural continuum' —multiple outcomes across a spectrum, and not a closed binary comparison.

• This therefore offers many alternatives and combinations that can be used to inform exhibition display. This presentation is too short to cover any of these aspects with more than a cursory introduction,

• However several aspects are highly pertinent to exhibitions and display, • And so ingrained that those of us working in museums most often do not even realize that they are not universal.

It should be noted that all cultures have preferred and dominant communication styles and practices which are then used as a prism for viewing all other cultures,

• Even for countries that have become quite multicultural there still exists dominant cultural patterns and preferences that we all carry with us.

So to briefly introduce the primary components relevant to exhibitions and display:

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Probably the most ingrained is that of ocularcentrism, also referred to as visualism—the western discourse of vision dating back to the work of Plato and Aristotle.

• Specifically since the Enlightenment it is the use of a hierarchy of senses to legitimize forms of authority with sight—and then hearing—as the primary senses for the creation of rational knowledge in western thought.

• And hence its language association with reason. • But the metaphor of seeing is not universal but is rather a part of a particular cultural tradition, and has had a huge

impact on how museums and exhibitions have developed. Senses, and therefore sensual hierarchies are culturally created, with different cultures creating their own material orders and in the process making slightly different senses. Western cultures have given prominence to what has been described as the archavistic as opposed to oral form of memory,

• And inherent to this has been the lowering of the other senses of smell, touch and taste. • However, this ordering—and its preferencing of the distance senses over the proximity senses—is not universal.

This western sense ordering is therefore not aligned with cultures which have traditionally had a greater balance of senses, and for whom orality has been a prime mode of communication,

• A form of communication with far greater social activity, creating relationships between speaker and listener. • Something that visualism cannot do.

When we all sat down for this session today specific components of each of our cultural understandings of space subconsciously directed us where to sit. Proxemics is the anthropological study of people's understandings and use of space as an aspect of culture.

• As the communicative function of space, proxemics is a component of non-verbal communication that has been used to analyse (theoretically and empirically):

o Understandings of space, and o Behaviour between different cultures and how this occurs in specific spaces.

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The main body of proxemics research has entered on what is called ‘personal space’, the spacing we all observe in different situations and which vary across cultures—and these are the understandings which governed where you sat this morning.

• There are many books published on this aspect with regard to doing business internationally–Don’t They Know It’s Friday? being the best known in the Gulf for visitors.

• The mostly subconscious ‘rules’ we all observe in public are culturally created and modified, and although may seem completely natural are not universal.

• These behaviours are tacit so we rarely realize they exist unless the boundaries are broken—this most often occurs in unfamiliar cultural settings.

A lesser-known aspect of proxemics is the design or layout of spaces as they relate to culture. Due to the subconscious nature of how we all think about space and interaction in it—which we all learn early in life—it is unsurprising that we would think of and create gallery design and display within our understandings.

• Gallery layout and design is an expression of culture irrespective of what is actually being displayed. • This means that design of transactional spaces—spaces where multiple people may engage in activities with or

separate from each other—will be culturally familiar to some visitors/audiences, but not to others, and may therefor project meanings quite contrary to what was intended.

Gallery design elements very common in western museum buildings include the prominence of the use of the edge of space over the centre, and square corners.

• Although certain types of exhibitions and museums, such as science centres and children’s museums, may have a more varied gallery layout these elements are prevalent in many museums.

According to research the edge-centre relationship in layout is a western tendency manifested in spaces where the central area is understood as a transitional space.

• This disuse of the central area is not absolute in western cultural practices, • However only when a central display is included, or possibly seating, does a western audience actively use a

gallery central space. • This disuse of central areas for display has also been seen as the reason for the apprehension by western

audiences of when in their route along the gallery wall displays to approach central exhibits. However, the active use of the centre of spaces is far more common in other cultures, including Japan and other parts of East Asia, therefore manifesting in greater exhibit use of central spaces as well as visitor interaction. The aspect of the use of square corners rather than curves within spaces and the accompanying arrangement of furniture and displays in ninety-degree angles to each other are also western preferences that are not universal. Traditional display methods in European and North American museums, particularly art museums,

• Represents the majority culture of interpersonal isolation and individualism, • The US being the world’s most individualistic country, • Minimizing the possibilities for conversation and stifling interaction.

Cultures with far greater interaction and collectivist orientations, which include Arab, Chinese and Latin American, therefore find these styles of layout cold, distancing and un-engaging. Part of the difficulty for non-western museums is the lack of available research on these aspects in places other than Europe and North America.

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• However the cultural and social underpinnings of why a particular understanding exists in western cultures highlights the fact that it will not be understood in the same way elsewhere.

For example within the Arabian Peninsula an aspect of space understandings often cited in architecture research is the desire for more visually open vistas within indoor spaces.

• US museum research on gallery occupancy rates has shown that visitors tended to stop in spaces with greater visual connections to other spaces, and which are most visually connected to a museum’s transitional spaces.

• This therefore leads to a greater awareness of other visitors in the museum. • Whether these two aspects of vistas and occupancy align—in other words desire for spaces, and behaviour in

spaces—and can inform Peninsula exhibition practice has yet to be investigated. Our sensory perceptions and hierarchy, and understandings of space, are therefore not universal but culturally learned. If our interaction with and in space and how we prefer to do this is not western, and more specifically, not Northern European/North American, what might the western iteration of the museum be communicating? Closely related aspects include:

Anthropologist Edward T Hall has stated that different cultures not only structure spaces differently but experience it differently, due to the ordering of senses.

• One of Hall's many research projects is worth noting for its direct relevance to display. From a 6-month interview series in the Middle East and America on space and object relationships,

• Hall concludes that his Arab interviewees saw the objects in context and with a far more holistic view than • The American interviewers, who saw the objects in relation to each other and independent from their context. • How this has been summed up is at the bottom of this slide

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At its most basic level this suggests that in fact museum display is even more important—and has a far higher communicative force—for higher context cultures,

• Making the use of western low context design even more uninformative for non-western audiences. Context ranges across the spectrum from low to high. Higher context cultures, which includes Japan, Korea and Arab cultures,

• Have a far greater sensitivity to non-verbal messages, • And are cultures where communication is relational, intuitive and emphasises interpersonal relationships.

Low context cultures, as just mentioned includes American, as well as Scandinavia, Germany and UK.

• And this is where communication is explicit, detailed and specific, • Where each word—written or spoken—has a literal meaning, • And the situation—or context—of the communication is not accentuated.

The place of context within communication applies as much to non-verbal as verbal communication in displays.

Within the Arabian Peninsula a component of identity curation is an individual’s place within, and relationships with, family, community and country, and associated cultural and social experiences.

• It is this social experience that is seen as an important component of collectivist cultures. Collectivist cultures—which to varying degrees include Arab, Asian, and Latin American cultures—are where, overall, collective goals and interaction are valued over an individual’s goals. Conversely, more individualistic cultures (North American, Northern European, Australian) are where personal accomplishments are seen as important, quite possibly at the expense of social relationships. A recent museum research project in Qatar is pertinent here:

• The Future Audience Research Project started in 2010 and is on-going. • A specific aspect of the early research was aimed at understanding family motivations for visiting museums.

The Qatar research found that at least in regard to the possible motivations to visit an exhibition or museum, those families questioned showed a very high propensity to be motivated by a ‘social’ experience, over an ‘intellectual’ one – 72% to 17%.

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This therefore shows a desire or understanding—it is not clear—that there is a greater interest in the museum as ‘attraction’ over museum as ‘archive’. Within audience research of motivations for visitorship,

• The greater the individualistic nature of the culture the greater the interest in museums and exhibitions as an intellectual pursuit.

• However this does not necessarily mean that the greater the collectivist nature of a culture, the greater the interest in a social pursuit, although the initial research in Qatar strongly suggests this.

For museums in the Peninsula there are several possible ramifications of a social and collectivist culture: • This may mean that collectivist cultures attend museums as larger groups—related aspects can be seen in family size

and visiting habits to other types of public and semi-public spaces. • Alternatively, however it may be that the needs and desires of a collectivist group (mixed gender, multi-generational)

may be felt to be better met at a location which offers multiple options: o In the Peninsula’s it is ‘shopping’ malls with their vast array of different opportunities in addition to actual

shopping If part of the attraction of shopping malls is the diversity of options and the variety of forms of engagement available—what might this mean for exhibitions and museums?

Chronemics is the cultural understandings of time,

• And of time perspectives—in other words the understandings of what would be described in western cultures as past, present, and future.

Again there is a spectrum of engagements—Western cultures, especially North American, are monochronic orientated,

• Where time is viewed as linear, moving from past, to present and into the future.

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• Monochronic cultures see time as a commodity, almost created into a reality which can be bought, saved, spent, or wasted,

• And where time is segmented into pieces, which allows for the planning of one item at a time, one after another. • For these cultures time is also future-orientated, where what is to come is valued and the future expected to be

‘better’ than the present. Across the continuum are polychronic cultures,

• Including Arab cultures, where time is not viewed as linear: it has been stated that “there can be a circular or cyclical quality to time . . . time and activities are fluid” (Zaharna 1995).

• Many things can be done at one time—unlike monochronic cultures where this would be viewed as chaos—and time is not segmented in the same way but more fluid, and many polychronic cultures place greater past-time importance.

• Polychronic orientation stresses the involvement of, and orientation to, people, relationships and society, with a far greater group orientation rather than an adherence to a schedule. Here the past acts as a guide for the present, and social relationships and traditions are highly important.

Closely related to chronemics is the final aspect I will mention:

• The aspect of thought frameworks—which range across the spectrum from linear dominant cultures to those which are non-linear.

Linear thought frameworks stress the written word,

• And rely on factual accuracy in communication, • As well as stressing analysis and reasoning.

In contrast to this are configurational cultures—in other words non-linear—

• This is where there is a heightened interest in the emotional meaning, symbolism, and audience rapport within communication.

Chronemics and thought frameworks would strongly suggest that exhibition elements such as chronological display, and western-style wall labels with their highly linear text,

• Are one end of the spectrum. • So we have to ask—what does that mean for audiences from anywhere else on the spectrum?

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Some of the other aspects of cross cultural communication theory, which could be highly informative to museums, are listed here.

In summary, more interactive, high context, group orientated, collectivist, polychromic, non-linear interaction will be more highly sought by Arab cultures in general, and those of the Peninsula more specifically. Although cross-cultural communication theory actively provides a ‘scale’ of options rather than creating an unhelpful binary comparison,

• On the whole western and northern European/North American aspects of communication all sit at one end of the scale.

• If it is the western model of the museum, and its accompanying practices that are prevalent in the Peninsula then

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this has major ramifications for the interest in and use of museums by citizens, and visitors from other GCC countries.

It is the fact that museums are part of culture—whether they are visited or not—and culture is shaped by society, is tradition based, and value building.

• How we choose to engage with culture is shaped by society and tradition. If museums are not attuned to the region’s desired ways of engaging,

• And a museums understanding of its ‘place’ • Then creating an emotional relationship that encourages museum visitorship and engagement, and the growth of the

museum profession, will be difficult. Exhibitions and museums can only actively contribute to the era of the learner, and encourage identity curation if they are visited – if people choose to visit. Multiple museum research projects have shown that we look for places which match and reinforce existing beliefs and practices, and in which we feel comfortable, both socially and cognitively.

• If the museum, wherever it may be, does not address these basic aspects, then it will not be as successful in its mission as it could be.

Thank You. REFERENCES Center for the Future of Museums, TrendsWatch 2013. http://www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-of-museums/trendswatch2013.pdf?sfvrsn=4 Gudykunst, William B. & Carmen M. Lee. 2002. ‘Cross-Cultural Communication Theories’, Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication second edition, Gudykunst, William B. & Bella Mody, eds., p.25-50 (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications) Hall, Robert W. 2010. Compression: Meeting the Challenges of Sustainability Through Vigorous Learning Enterprises (New York: Productivity Press) New Media Consortium, Horizon Report > 2013 Museums Edition. http://www.nmc.org/publications/2013-horizon-report-museum Rounds, Jay. 2006. ‘Doing Identity Work in Museums’. Curator, vol. 49, no. 2, April, p.133-150 Zaharna, R. S. 1995. Rhetorical Ethnocentricism: Understanding the Rhetorical Landscape of Arab-American Relations, Speech Communication Association conference paper, November 1994, New Orleans. http://academic2.american.edu/~zaharna/rhetoric.htm Accessed 9 February 2009 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Peter A. & Michael Hecht et al. 2003. ‘Nonverbal Communication Across Cultures’, Cross-cultural and Intercultural Communication, Gudykunst, William B. ed., p.73-90 (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications, Inc.)

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Classen, Constance & David Howes. 2006. ‘The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts’, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture, Edwards, Elizabeth & Chris Gosden et al. eds., p.199-222 (Oxford: Berg) Gudykunst, William B., ed. 2005. Theorizing about Intercultural Communication (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications) Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the Senses: the sensual culture reader (Oxford: Berg) Jandt, Fred E. 2009. An Introduction to Intercultural Communication: Identities in a Global Community sixth edition (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications) Neuliep, James W. 2008. Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach fourth edition (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications) Zaharna, R. S. 1995. ‘Understanding Cultural Preferences of Arab Communication Patterns’, Public Relations Review, vol. 21, no. 2, fall 1995, p.241-255 ----------------- 2000. Overview: Cultural Continuums, American University, Washington DC. http://academic2.american.edu/~zaharna/continuums1.html Accessed 9 February 2009 ----------------- 2001. ‘”In-awareness” approach to international public relations’, Public Relations Review, vol. 27, issue 2, summer 2001, p.135-148 ----------------- 2009. ‘An Associative Approach to Intercultural Communication in the Arab World’, The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Competence, Deardorff, Darla K. ed., p.179-195 (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications Inc.)