Museum Spaces and the Visitor Experience

I’ve been at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea for five weeks now. Besides getting to grips with systems and policies, I’ve also been having lots of conversations with staff about our museum spaces. I’ve been keen to understand: how are we and our visitors using them, what works for our and their purposes, and where is room for improvement?

Space before Content

The temptation is always there to dive straight into tightening our thematic focus and thinking creatively about how to present its stories. Which WOW! object to animate with video and sound in our entrance hall is admittedly a more exciting topic than where school groups might best store their bags.  

However, school children are of course an important segment of our visitors. As are families. Or the solo traveller on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Wales. Then there is the need to generate income: we’re talking café, retail, events and commercial hire.

When museum spaces don’t consider these requirements, you almost always end up with unhappy compromises.

A case in point

Our entrance hall is a good example of this. It hosts our temporary exhibitions, but because the hall is also used for events and commercial hire, the exhibitions are confined to movable boards and exhibits – not at all the standard we would like. On top of that, we’re confronting visitors with a temporary exhibition before they’ve even engaged with our permanent theme(s) – a likely contributor to what has been described as a weak identity of the museum.

Examining the purposes the entrance hall has been conscripted to serve, we’ve come to realise that we need a separate, high quality space for temporary exhibitions. We also need to ensure our identity shines bright as soon as visitors come through the door, while also leaving enough space for people to gather, either for events or just to be.

Now that we know that, we can start thinking about the details – what is that identity? Which objects and presentations can best illustrate it at a glance? How might the space be organised?

Space as Content

There is also another reason for really looking at (existing) spaces, rather than thinking of them merely as rooms to be filled. Because sometimes, those spaces themselves are part of the story.

Take our historic Warehouse: built around 1900, it sits alongside what was once the historic dock from where goods were traded internationally, with traces of the historic infrastructure still legible in the built environment surrounding us. The Warehouse symbolises much of what made Wales the first industrial nation, with goods transported from the resource-rich hinterland to the sea and out into the world.

At the moment, however, this is all but invisible to visitors. The Warehouse is a key permanent exhibition space, and nearly all windows connecting the building to its environment have been blocked or darkened. This makes sense from a conservation point of view, for some objects would be at risk from direct natural light. Unfortunately, though, this has also robbed a historic asset of its ability to immerse visitors in the story we’re trying to tell. Rather than thinking of the space as a shell without meaning, we are now looking at opening up the Warehouse’s sense of place to move our story forward.

And now: the themes

Now that we understand the spaces and the requirements they have to meet, we’re ready to look at themes, objects, stories and interpretation. For me, making sure the visitor journey through the museum works will be an important consideration. We don’t have a natural one-way route, so a key challenge will be to help the stories unfold within the spaces that host them.