Experience
MuseumLab: Exploring museums, understanding learning
MuseumLab investigates how people experience exhibitions and what they take away from them. It combines the real-life setting of an exhibition space with the opportunities offered by controlled research.
Exploring Learning and Experience
What is MuseumLab?
MuseumLab is a museum-like experimental laboratory at the IWM. In a space of approximately 80 square meters, real exhibition situations can be flexibly recreated and specifically modified. This creates a unique research environment that bridges the gap between traditional laboratory research and museum practice.
Here researchers investigate how people perceive, experience, and learn from exhibitions. At the same time, individual factors of exhibition design can be systematically altered to better understand their influence on visitor experiences.
Our goal
As museums evolve from places of information transmission to spaces for dialogue, participation, and societal reflection, understanding visitor experience becomes increasingly important. MuseumLab enables us to investigate how exhibitions can be designed to promote learning, engagement, participation and inclusion.
The goal is to gain scientifically sound insights and, together with museum partners, make them applicable in practice.
Two key elements define the MuseumLab
Flexible Exhibition Space
The exhibition space can be adapted to accommodate different research questions and scenarios. For example, the following can be varied:
- Exhibition Media
- Spatial layouts (configurable walls, exhibition elements, etc.)
- Exhibit placement
- Lighting conditions
- Information design
- Interactive stations
- Narrative structures
- Digital installations
Multimodal data collection
State-of-the-art research technologies enable the detailed study of visitor behavior and experience.
Available methods include:
- Spotlight audio systems
- RGB camera-based movement analysis
- Audio and video recordings for behavioral observation and movement tracking
“What makes the MuseumLab special is that we can study realistic exhibition settings under controlled conditions. This allows us to systematically investigate how exhibition design influences visitors’ learning and experiences – and work with museums to put these insights into practice.”
Prof. Dr. Eva Specker, Head of the MuseumLab
Museum Research at the IWM
The MuseumLab complements the Future Innovation Space (FIS) as the IWM’s second “living lab” and builds on the institute’s long-standing expertise in museum research.
The IWM has been collaborating with museums for many years and is involved, among other initiatives, in the Leibniz Excellence Center for Museum Education (Leibniz BIM), the Crossroads of Research and Art Experience (CREA) network, and BILAD.
Get involved!
MuseumLab works closely with museums and other partners in the field. Together, we develop and explore innovative approaches to exhibitions and informal learning environments.
Are you interested in collaborating with us, or would you like to learn more about MuseumLab? Feel free to contact us.
Your contact
Project Manager MuseumLab
+49 7071 979-290e.specker@iwm-tuebingen.de