Keywords

1 Introduction

‘Nature creates bodies, but it is stories that turn them into people’. ([17], p. 9, own translation).

Since the advent of new museology at the end of the 1980s [16], with its shift from objects to stories and meaning-making, putting people and their stories at the centre of museum experiences, storytelling has become one of the dominant approaches used in museums as an exhibition practice, to design such visitors experiences, because of its ability to trigger emotions, to help create meaning and to evoke memories in people. Previous research [11] has indeed shown that storytelling leads to an increased feeling of narrative transportation (i.e., of being drawn into the story), and to more vivid and accurate memories than when only factual information is provided. This proves particularly interesting and important in museums where design is used to help tell the story in an attempt to ‘anchor content to context’ [14]. Back in the 1990s, narratologist Mieke Bal was already comparing walking through a museum to reading a book [2]. Like with reading a book, for which, next to the linear order of one page following another, there is also the order that the active reader makes for themselves, by creating meaning (see for instance in [9]), so is for museums, where, besides the visitor following the routing that the curator has foreseen and the museum space allows, there is the meaning-making that visitors actively do, regardless of this physical order.

In this sense, storytelling is, according to museum specialist Leslie Bedford, ‘an ideal strategy for realizing the constructivist museum, an environment where visitors of all ages and backgrounds are encouraged to create their own meaning and find that place, the intersection between the familiar and the unknown where genuine learning occurs’ ([3], quoted in [18], p. 4). The challenge for the exhibition (experience) designer is how to make the design of an exhibition contribute to telling a story and to facilitating its comprehension.

In this article, we present how we tackled this challenge for the Marquise Palace (Markiezenhof in Dutch), the city palace in Bergen op Zoom, a town in the South of the Netherlands.

2 Design

For the Marquise Palace, which hosts the city museum and has no major artworks on display, storytelling seemed to be the best tool to redesign the visitor experience with the goal of helping the museum to rebrand part of its collection. We, a team of researchers and designers from Breda University, redesigned its 4 period rooms (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Copyright: Moniek Hover.

The original period rooms in the Marquise Palace where Marie Anne’s story is staged (from left to right): ballroom, bedroom, dining room, and epilogue room.

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We had initially developed the overarching narrative concept for the redesign of the whole city museum, which became the Palace of Secrets. Sometime after this, for the redesign of the 4 period rooms, we developed the storyline and interactions for the period rooms by linking the true dramatic story of Marie Anne van Arenberg, a historical figure, to these rooms. Her life has been marked by secrets. Marie Anne became marquise of Bergen op Zoom in the early 18th century by marriage. To satisfy her family’s pressure for social status, she had indeed married, at a still young age, the much older marquis Francois Egon, with whom she has a daughter. When the child is about three, Francois dies. Almost immediately after, Marie Anne starts a love affair with the late marquis’s footman, Simon de Maisy, whom she eventually marries in secret, as he is of lesser social status. The marriage is officiated by the Cardinal of Bouillon, who, soon after it, starts to blackmail her: he wants Marie Anne to grant him custody of her daughter so that he can make claim to the late marquis’s fortune, otherwise he will disclose this marriage to the rest of the family. Marie Anne’s status-driven mother, who is desperate to maintain the family’s position, eventually finds out about the secret marriage and forces Marie Anne to divorce Simon. If not, she will cast Marie Anne out of the family, and she herself will take custody of her granddaughter. So, Marie Anne is facing a dilemma: should she give up the love of her life to keep her child, or should she run away with Simon de Maisy but be cast out of the family and never see her daughter again?

Each of the period rooms is inspired by one of these secrets by representing a turning point in Marie Anne’s story: the official marriage, the secret marriage and the betrayal, and the dilemma and choice, with, in a final room, the epilogue. These different episodes are reflected in the way the rooms are furnished: a ballroom, a bedroom, a dining room. The design principles we adopted assumed that the rooms would remain as much as possible close to their original design as to allow for art historical guided tours. Moreover, that the new design should strive to strike a balance between the amount of content that was provided and the amount of effort that was required by the visitors to understand it. It is a layered approach to disclosing content whereby in-depth, backstories are present for those who want to get to know more but that are not necessary to get the gist of the story since they also require more effort to be found. The assumption behind this design choice is that not everybody needs to experience everything and is, therefore, free to ponder how much cognitive effort to invest in this visit (see in [4]). In line with these guidelines, the rooms were ‘reframed’ as ‘sets’, and the objects as ‘props’ for the story.

In the new exhibition design, many digital and interactive elements were used to draw the visitor into the story. Following the star exhibit model [12], the main digital interactions (the video of the ball in the ballroom, the shadow play in the sleeping room, the moving table in the dining room) lead the visitor through the main turning points of the story in a rather linear way. Yet the visitor, as mentioned earlier, can also decide to roam the rooms freely and discover, at their own pace and in their own way, all the other elements that are there to stage this story. Many are still 17th-century collection items from the original exhibition design (the harpsichord, the fireplace, the dining table with the original dish set in a nearby cupboard), some are reproductions in the style of that period (the cardinal’s painting, the family portrait, the jewelry box). On both types, an interactive component has been added which introduces other characters who bring in their own perspective on the events which took place during Marie Anne’s life, giving visitors additional insights into the true events of the story. In some cases, like with the family portrait, this allows the visitor to become part of the story themselves by making choices (in this case, by signing either the divorce or the custody documents under the portrait itself, which changes portraying different family members as a result of this decision) and therefore ‘influencing’ the course of events and the end of the story. Only in the final, epilogue room, this is finally disclosed by means of an information panel that reports Marie Anne’s final decision and what happened to her and the other characters after this. There are also some other objects with no interactive component in the exhibition, of which some are original, like the canopy bed, and some are not, like the stuffed dog.

The Secret Marquise as design and exhibition has led to an increase in visitor numbers to the museum. As designers and researchers, however, we were interested in understanding more about this success. In particular, we wanted to understand what the visitors experienced, both emotionally and sensorially, at different moments during this story-driven design. Moreover, we were interested in understanding the meaning of this experience based on the participants’ personal context, which includes the frame of reference they adopted during their visit and their previous experiences. Next to this, we wanted to understand how the design helps tell the story, i.e., how the museum space, consisting of the digital elements and physical objects, supports storytelling and meaning-making and determines the visitors’ experience.

3 Approach

In the fall of 2021, the visitors’ lived experience was evaluated using different approaches: a quantitative approach using biometric wristbands to register people’s emotions during their visit, and a qualitative one consisting of a combination of observations, visual imagery, and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA [19]) to access the personal meaning visitors ascribed to this visit and experience. This article addresses the results of this qualitative analysis.

Qualitatively, our aim was to understand how respondents made sense of Marie Anne’s story in the way in which this was presented throughout the exhibition. Building on John Dewey’s seminal work on aesthetic experience, with the focus on interaction and continuity [8], we specifically looked at the visitors’ personal context and frame of reference (e.g., their previous experiences, the connection to the visitors’ own life story, possible associations with other stories from other sources) as related to the story on display in the period rooms since the visitor, rather than remaining an external observer of the exhibit, becomes part of the emerging story [7]. They do so by providing their own interpretation – they play an active role by ‘putting the disparate pieces together, filling-in narrative gaps, and enlivening through the use of imagination’ ([7], p. 451). In this way, they create their own meaning and understanding of it.

This ‘active role’ refers to the constructivist tradition in the arts which sees in closure the place where the resolution between text and reader (but also between movie and viewer or performance and audience [9]) takes place. This requires a dual process of selection and combination, i.e., the selection of particular narrative elements (characters, images, sounds, events, and settings) from a series of pre-given ones, and the combination of these chosen elements to generate specific tales and meanings.

In museum practice, this approach is well expressed in Chronis’s framework of narrative construction [7] through a 3-stage process that starts when visitors enter the experiential space of the museum by bringing along their existing knowledge and experiences related to it and select (‘narrative enrichment’) and combine (‘narrative imagining’) elements from the exhibition, ultimately making sense of them (‘narrative closure’). This implies that they interpret them according to their own frame of reference which consists of their pre-existing knowledge of the topic, of previous experiences, and of their own life story.

This puts the focus on what Connelly & Clandinin call ‘the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space of temporality, place and sociality’ ([6], p. 54). The sociality they refer to implies the establishment of a relational engagement between the researcher and the participant. We achieved this by having conversational interviews [21] with the visitors, with the purpose of unlocking their lived experience, without steering them too much towards reconstructing the experience or remembering it.

4 Method

30 participants, evenly divided between male and female, with ages ranging between 23 and 76 years, were selected through convenience sampling. For the pre-visit interview, we asked them to bring along an artifact that they felt typifies them, as an icebreaker to get familiar and to create a safe environment before the actual visit could start. We invited them to take pictures with their smartphone of what made them curious or triggered their attention during the visit, while we shadowed them as participant observants. After the visit, we had in-depth, conversational interviews (see above). Our focus, as mentioned, was on interviews as conversations by using the artifact they brought along, to trigger the telling of stories, on the relational engagement between researcher and participant, and on the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space of temporality (how the visit unfolded), of place (what was noticed by the visitors in the museum space and what not, and how this was discovered) and of sociality (if and how they interacted with other people, considering that some of the visitors were visiting together with a friend or a family member) [6].

We started this conversation by asking them to draw on an empty map of the exhibition space the way they had navigated that space and to indicate what they had experienced in each room. Additionally, we also looked at the pictures they had taken during their visit and used them to trigger emotions and understand their frame of reference better.

The data we collected was analysed using the narrative experience method (NEM [20]). First, by means of IPA, we searched through the transcripts of each participant’s interview for interesting quotes, for repeated terms, for anything that seemed relevant in the light of the research questions we were addressing (namely, understanding the visitors experience, understanding their meaning-making process and understanding how the design helps tell the story – see above). Subsequently, we have reconstructed each participant’s narrative of their visit trying to make sense of the information we had identified in the previous phase focusing first on what the participants had experienced (textural description [1]: the possible meanings that the visit has evoked in the participants) and then on how they have experienced it (structural description [1]: how the process of meaning creation unfolds over the course of the experience). To this end, we have also made use of the notes we had taken, of the floor plan with the routing they have followed that they have drawn at the start of our conversation, and of the pictures they had shared with us. This allowed us to link these initial annotations to emerging themes at a higher level of abstraction, so as to come to themes ‘which are high-level enough to allow theoretical connections within and across [participants] which are still grounded in the particularity of the specific thing said’ ([19], p. 41). In this way, we could identify underlying values and meanings that the participant was expressing. In all of this, our own interpretation as researchers clearly plays a significant role. This is why establishing an emotional engagement between researcher and participant from the beginning is so important to guarantee that the researcher’s interpretation remains tuned to what the participant really means (or is believed to).

On the basis of the above, we have derived recurring themes.

5 Results

5.1 Roaming the Exhibition

Our results show that many participants started their visit by exploring the museum space as a way to get to know it. This exploration brought them first to discover the physical objects in the rooms, which also entailed reading the information panels next to these objects (as for example with the paintings).

To guide the participants through their visit of the 4 period rooms, they could also use a map of the exhibition that was offered to them by a butler at the exhibition entrance, in the form of an invitation to the wedding ball of Marie Anne with Francois Egon. This invitation shows twelve touchpoints over the four rooms and invites the participants to go through to get to the full story experience. Some participants pointed out that they did not find it obvious that they had to walk to the butler and pick up the invitation. This created a misunderstanding in some cases on what to do further.

‘It was a shame that we did not notice the importance of the invitation and the exciting story from the beginning.’ (R06).

Some others found the welcoming introduction by the butler not engaging enough to raise their attention. Some, not knowing what the story was about, lost their interest in the remainder of the experience, while others became even more curious to know what was going on.

‘I was very curious about the next room and then the next. I was thinking; okay nice but what now? It is fun enough to keep going on a discovery.’ (R08).

Although the invitation was a tool to help participants not only roam the rooms but also make sense of the story, they were free to move around in the way that best suited them. Most said to have appreciated this freedom of movement. This however had an impact on their story understanding. Participants were not always ‘hooked’ to the story and did not always understand the purpose of its design.

‘When I entered the first room, I was waiting for something to happen. And when it didn’t, I decided to go and discover the rooms myself.’ (R09).

Our results however show that the majority of our participants did take and read the invitation. The invitation suggests that there is an order to navigate the rooms and explore the space and indeed we observed that the participants who read the map were not just wandering around in the museum space. At the same time, though, they reported afterwards that this gave them the feeling that there was a ‘right’ way of roaming the rooms and that they could get it ‘wrong’. And indeed, in this case, we saw them go back and forth to do what they thought they had missed out.

‘We may have missed half of it, but if we had read the invitation it would have gone well.’ (R11).

5.2 The Role of the Digital Touchpoints

The interactive elements easily caught the participants’ attention, especially if they were big enough to be spotted in their exploration, impressively designed and clearly visible in the room (see Fig. 2). An example of this is the dinner table (see Fig. 2, centre) with splashing wine glasses and moving objects on it to represent the heavy discussion at dinner among the family members as a tool to express the fracture in the family (which is also visibly drawn on the table itself) once Marie Anne has to face her final choice between the love for her husband and the love for her daughter.

‘I did not expect the table scene to be so intense, it was at that point that my emotions started to take the better of me.’ (R22).

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Copyright: Moniek Hover.

An overview of the interactive elements, one per room (from left to right): the butler with the invitation, the talking painting of the cardinal, the dinner table with the last family quarrel, and the family portrait which changes depending on which document (either divorce or custody) one signs below it.

Full size image

On the contrary, smaller objects like the jewelry box were not easily noticed, precisely because they are less eye-catching and their function both in the room and in hindsight also in the story’s meaning-making was not immediately clear, and could therefore constrain the narrative enrichment, imagining and closure [7]. The combination of these features created a sense of irritation and confusion for these objects in the participants because they were perceived as purely distracting, non-functional elements, while the digital elements were perceived as very effective in bringing the story to life and emotionally very immersive and intense.

‘The talking painting, that was amazing. Also, the very simplistic movements of the curtains, it makes you think of a magical world.’ (R06).

Most participants could easily understand how to interact with these artefacts, also when this was not intuitive and they had to find it out by themselves and experienced this interaction in a positive way (for example, again, the dinner table and the talking portrait).

‘There were several ways to activate them and that was very funny! Somehow, your brain works differently, then; you pay more attention because you are part of the process.’ (R16).

Moreover, they reported feeling a general sense of curiosity for the digital elements, of surprise for their novelty, of pleasure and fun for the way they look and operate. Nevertheless, digital elements have been perceived in some cases as awkward, like the noise of the engine activating the interaction at the dinner table, as distracting from one’s own flow in the story, when the visitor is not involved in this interaction and this is started by other people in the room, but most of all, as requiring too much of the participants’ attention.

‘If other people are behind you and you are at the fire, you will not hear the story, everything will be mixed up.’ (R04).

But the fact that they had to be active participants and not just passive observers of the events staged in the exhibition, because they had to put certain actions in motion themselves, raised their interest in the story and fueled their narrative imagination.

‘The way it’s presented makes everything come closer’. ‘You aren’t only an observer.’ (R05).

While the alternation between traditional and digital storytelling touchpoints was experienced as effective in delivering the story, the participants experienced the combination of interactive elements and static physical objects as overwhelming. There were simply too many touchpoints in the story to allow participants to process them properly and at their own pace. They reported feeling a sort of pressure to move on, to explore further, and missed the presence of an empty space for them to sit and ‘digest’ the information between storytelling touchpoints, to sit and reflect on what was just experienced [13].

Interestingly, though, respondents pointed out that they felt relieved when they entered the last, epilogue room and were only confronted with a form of traditional storytelling: a panel in which the true story of Marie Anne was presented.

‘At the end of the story the total picture, the subject and the outcome were told. I reckon it might be better if it was stated in the beginning in order to raise my interest in the story, it was not on during the story.’ (R24).

‘I wanted to know how it all ended, like with a Netflix series, whether she (i.e., the small child) ever saw her mother again.’ (R10).

This panel, by simply listing facts and events, did not leave space for any (mis)interpretations of the types that the digital interactions did allow, but was also perceived as more limiting in allowing participants to make their own meaning of the story. This seemed however to be the most effective way to end the visit (and the story) and to help visitors come to a closure. When it comes to understanding it, only a minority of the participants did understand the story, but sometimes only in hindsight (narrative closure), also because only a minority of them reported having understood the role of all the objects in the rooms for story comprehension. Of these, the digital elements, although making them more actively involved in the story, did not always succeed in drawing participants into it. As a result, we often witnessed a mismatch between what they (reported to have) experienced (so, the meaning they have created) and what the story is really about.

6 Discussion and Conclusion

The aim of this study was to understand how storytelling can be used as a tool to design museum experiences, knowing that a narrative approach to design is not new in museum practice and is rooted in the constructivist tradition in the humanities. In our redesign of the period rooms, many storytelling touchpoints are provided in the form of either static or interactive objects, which all become cues the visitor must find to build the puzzle of understanding Marie Anne’s story and of unlocking her secrets. To refer to Chronis [7], again, these touchpoints could facilitate the narrative enrichment, imaging and closure of the participants.

‘If those moments of digital interaction were not there, I would have walked straight through, it also awoke my interest in reading the storyboards, because I wanted to keep learning more.’ (R04).

While the alternation of traditional and digital storytelling was experienced as effective in delivering this story, the number of touchpoints was overwhelming and difficult for participants to deal with, in an attempt to strike the right balance between getting to know (enough) content to be able to make sense of the story and the amount of effort required to disclose it. This shows that too many touchpoints could hamper the process of self-exploration which facilitates narrative enrichment, imagining and closure.

‘I had the feeling that I was constantly pulled back by the moving paintings for example. I wanted to feel the experience without being bothered.’ (R16).

Participants needed a story-free space, a space in which they could ‘mumble’ the cues they had collected until that moment, a ‘space to imagine’ [10], in which they could let the information sink to be able to reflect upon it.

‘I find it disappointing that all my attention went to the digital touchpoints and that I was therefore not able to look outside, to the paintings and to the walls. I had no time to think about what just happened.’ (R09).

This ‘reflective space’ [15] which is typical of art galleries becomes in museums a ‘free space’ [15] that facilitates and supports ‘open-ended communication’ [15] and is against the linear routing of curatorship. It supports a more personal fruition of the museum space itself.

Nevertheless, this design has proven effective in helping the museum tell Marie Anne’s story and in helping the participants build their plot. i.e., their meaning of it.

‘This (i.e., the shadow play in the bedroom that stages Marie Anne’s love story, from getting a child from Francois to his death and her love affair with Simon) was the point on which the gradient of the story became clear to me and I could connect the dots more easily in the rooms after.’ (R01).

How meaning is created, what conclusion is reached, which interpretation they give to her life, what choice they had made had they been in her shoes, all depends on the frame of reference participants bring along which makes them identify or not with one of the characters in this story. So, some may sympathise with Marie Anne as the young woman who chooses to follow the love of life; some others would instead identify themselves with Marie Anne-the mother and choose to protect their child.

‘You have to make a choice for her, that gives you the feeling of what you would do. And then you think about what you find relevant in life.’ (R18).

So, even though not all participants were able to indicate what the message of this story really is, they have all been able to create a meaning that is relevant to them. This proves how a storytelling-driven design is effective in telling a story, less, however, how effective it was to embed and root this content to the museum space. But this also proves, as Jerome Bruner had already concluded in his book Acts of Meaning [5], that storytelling is indeed the primary tool by which human beings make meaning.