Looking Back and Looking Forward: the Rise of the Visitor-centered Museum

This paper presents some personal perceptions about “drivers of change,” which have impacted the role and nature of museums since the 1980s, leading to the rise of the visitor-centered museum. Such changes mirror developments occurring in society. In the case of museums, a decline in public funding has occurred at a time when increased resources are required to enable museums to successfully compete for the visitor dollar in the expanding “experience economy.” The authors suggest that the role and nature of museums in the future will be shaped by their responses to many challenges, the most important being: how to increase visitor numbers without negatively impacting on visitor satisfaction; how to adjust policy and practice as museums approach the limits of visitor growth; how to start to reverse the trend of declining public funding by demonstrating museums’ value to society through the adoption of community-centered policies and practice; and perhaps the most unpredictable, how museums will adjust their policies and practices in the face of possible climate change. We, the co-authors of this article, met approximately 20 years ago, when Roy Ballantyne visited the United Kingdom on a British Council Scholarship. The aim of the scholarship was to investigate the use of museums as informal education sites to overcome the problems of teaching students within the segregated Apartheid education system existing in South Africa at that time. As part of this process, David Uzzell inducted Roy Ballantyne into the world of museums and interpretation by sharing his knowledge, literature, personal experience, and passion for heritage and environmental interpretation within museum settings. Over a three-month period, the two of us visited many museums, heritage and environmental centers, where we critically discussed our opinions of myriad displays and exhibitions. It was the Margaret Thatcher era, and museums were being “shaken-up”—challenged to pay their way. Museum professionals, who had traditionally been specialists skilled in identifying and classifying objects, were being retrained to communicate the value of their collections and attract the public. Reminiscing about our past museum experiences, recently, we have been reflecting on what the possible nature and purposes of museums will be like in another 20 years. What role will they play in society? What processes will shape their practices? How will they be funded?