Affordances and distributed cognition in museum exhibitions

Marianne Achiam, Michael May, Martha Marandino

Museum Management and Curatorship· 2014-09-24· article· 28 citationsclosed

Museums and Cultural Heritage Libraries and Information Services Embodied and Extended Cognition

Abstract

Exhibitions are the primary medium for the public communication of science in museums. Recently, there has been an interest in explaining the educational mechanisms of exhibitions in terms of meaning making, interaction and space; however these concepts have not yet been integrated into one consistent framework. Here, we invoke the notions of affordance and distributed cognition to explain in a coherent way how visitors interact with exhibits and exhibit spaces and make meaning from those interactions, and we exemplify our points using observations of twelve visitors to exhibits at a natural history museum. We show how differences in exhibit characteristics give rise to differences in the interpretive strategies used by visitors in their meaning-making process, and conclude by discussing how the notions of affordance and distributed cognition can be used in an exhibit design perspective.

Cite this

Marianne Achiam, Michael May, Martha Marandino (2014). Affordances and distributed cognition in museum exhibitions. Museum Management and Curatorship. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2014.957479

@article{marianne2014affordances,
  title  = {Affordances and distributed cognition in museum exhibitions},
  author = {Achiam, Marianne and May, Michael and Marandino, Martha},
  year   = {2014},
  journal = {Museum Management and Curatorship},
  doi    = {10.1080/09647775.2014.957479}
}

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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

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