Assessing the impact of exhibit arrangement on visitor behavior and learning

The museum is a physical setting that visitors usually freely choose to enter. The physical context for all museum visits (Falk and Dierking, 1992) includes the architecture and "feel" of the building as well as the objects and exhibits on display. A significant percentage of museum research has considered how visitors respond to the physical context, at both the macrolevel of visitor pathways, orientation, and museum fatigue and the microlevel of exhibit label font size and content. As museums continually strive to communicate better with their publics, a relevant physical context concern is how best to sequence information to facilitate understanding. Most exhibit designers begin with the implicit assumption that the order in which a visitor encounters information will affect his or her understanding. This assumption has never been directly tested. Previous studies provide some insights into the significance of exhibit sequencing and arrangement.