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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00942
- Thesis Title
- Neurocurating: Creating memories for the future (A neuroscience-informed interdisciplinary curatorial model to enhance visitors’ experience in museum settings)
- Author
- Mahzabin Haque
- E-mail
- mahzabinhaque AT gmail.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Master of Arts in Media Arts Cultures (MediaAC)
- Year
- 2020
- Number of Pages
- 116
- University
- University of Łódź
- Thesis Supervisor
- Prof. dr hab. Ryszard W. Kluszczyński
- Supervisor e-mail
- ryszard.w.kluszczynski AT uni.lodz.pl
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Media Arts Cultures
- Copyright Ownership
- Mahzabin Haque
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English, Bangla
- URL where full thesis can be found
- Keywords
- Curating, Neuroscience-informed experience design, Exhibition design, Neuroscience
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- The year 1989 marked a milestone in the history of museum evolution, as it introduced significant tangible changes in a museum setting (Bishop, 2013). Following major curtailments in public funding for cultural affairs and the resultant declination in the number of visitors, discussion about the need for 'new museology' Vergo (1989) proposed in his anthology of the same name (Olsen, 2014).
In the past few decades, various attempts were made to understand the underlying causes behind museums' struggle to engage with their audience. In an attempt to make museums more visitor-friendly and to revive their previous social values, the idea of 'Starchitecture' (museums built by star architects, as described by Bishop, 2013) came into play. However, in the last decade, museums have entered into the experience-economy domain, which places the economy or revenue generation at the center. For example, Qatar's new National Museum is publicized as '1.5 kilometers of experience,' the Digital Art Museum in Paris offers 'multi-sensory experiences' of artworks, and teamLab, an International experimental art collective, organizes their blockbuster exhibitions around the globe. Such initiatives have generated a record amount of revenue compared to museums with traditional settings. Critics argue that the experience of visiting a museum has become a performance that completely ignores the very reason museums were originally established – to be educational institutions where one would go to learn about objects, people, and civilizations (JiaJia Fei, 2019).
Neuroscience defines all experiences as the product of neural activities occurring inside the brain. Moreover, it investigates the underlying mechanisms of how various external stimuli – visual, auditory, touch, smell, and taste – influence neuronal functioning and how the resultant activities impact human psychology and
behavior. The author argues that it is imperative to analyze museum visitors' psychology to design a memorable experience, which should take into account the diversity of visitor types, for example – explorer, facilitator, professional/hobbyist, experience seeker, and recharger (Falk, 2008), to ensure that they remember the experience even after walking away from the museum space. Insights from neuroscience will help curators to understand how the elements in an exhibition – art, architecture (shape, form, color, proportion, light, etc.), and narrative – come together to significantly impact visitors' perceptions (Sternberg, 2010; Banaei et al., 2017). With the help of neuroscience, curators would thereby be able to incorporate neurologically stimulating tools when designing an exhibition.
These initiatives would incorporate knowledge of neuroscience into exhibition designing and design it to evoke significant emotion or feeling or to simply make it memorable. The author attempts to draw attention to such practices and proposes that such practices would be the perfect method of striking a balance between experience design and museum visiting experience. The author addresses such initiative as 'neurocurating,' an approach of incorporating neuroscience knowledge into exhibition designing. Furthermore, by drawing insights from multidisciplinary studies bordering with neuroscience, this present exploratory study analyzed such practices' future potential(s).