Learning at Museums: Visitor Experience Design Training
Learning At Museums is a 3-week long training programme for Museum Educators in pedagogies of museum learning and tools of user experience design to draw out and map visitor needs and expectations.
Role: Learning Designer and Training Facilitator
Client: Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, New Delhi, India
Lead Organisation: Flow India
Learners: Museum educators and docents
Sector: Culture
The Brief
To become a 21st century space of meaning-making, it is not enough for museums to make accessible spaces, but to see visitors as partners and participants of the user experience, and engage with them in a dialogue to determine what museums can offer.
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In 2017, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum (IGMT Museum), New Delhi, had created a range of printed learning resources for young visitors from schools and colleges, but soon realised that visitors were not engaging with their activities and were not able to effectively engage with objects during their visit.
To reassess their internal learning design process, and to train their new Education Officer and outreach team to design engaging experiences for young visitors, the IGMT Museum hired Flow India to design a comprehensive training programme that could then be embedded in their outreach programming.
My Design Process
As the Education Design Lead and lead facilitator of the project with Flow India, I designed an interactive 3-week long training programme for the museum’s Education and Outreach Department.
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Framed within the pedagogy of museum learning and tools and mindsets of user centred design, this unique training brought to the forefront a range of best practices that allowed museum educators to draw out and map visitor needs and expectations.
​I designed a series of research and in-museum activities for participants to learn by doing, and created a workbook for everyone to ideate, document their learning, and assess their learning by following up on the evaluation tools I shared. One of the key components of the design process, was to codify and transfer the skills of the Flow India team in creating curriculum-linked experiential activities for school children, to the museum education team who do not come from an instructional design or education background.
Each session I designed not only introduced the participants to the topic at hand, but also equipped them with the tools and ideas to build on these topics and embed the toolkit in the museums staff training and visitor engagement programmes.
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The sessions were designed to be interactive, with the first half of the day focusing on introducing the theory, origins, and ideas behind the topic of the day, and participants testing and prototyping their learning in the museum and with the visitors that day.
Outcome
‘Learning At Museums: Outreach and Visitor Experience Design Training’ is a 6-session training programme for museum professionals. Each session looks at the following key topics:
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Introduction to Museums and Museum Learning
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How We Learn
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Object-Based Learning
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What we Learn From User Centred Design: Experience Design in Museums
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Designing Museum Learning Sessions for Children
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During the training, participants engage with visitors at the museum using user centred design processes to identify visitor needs, and design and test activities and museum engagement experiences for young visitors.
As this was a pilot training, Flow India invited students of three different schools to test the Museum staff’s learning experiences to give live feedback on the training outcomes.
Impact
The learning experiences designed by the Education Team during the training and were piloted with children were a success, with all three school groups invited for the project returning to the museum with new students as they enjoyed the sessions so much.
“I didn’t realise that Mrs. Gandhi's childhood diaries and toys was getting the most attention from young visitors! The visitor shadowing and journey mapping activities made me realise this opportunity to engage with young visitors by creating targeted learning resources and more accessible displays.”- Sanskriti, Head of Education, Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum.
The museum has now embedded the training protocol in their Education Programme, and use the user centred design strategies and tools to train docents and new members of the team.
A participant interviews visitors of diverse age-groups to understand their needs and pain-points at the museum..