Designing welcoming museum visits
Visitor-experience researchers, who have influenced the output of major exhibition teams by studying how our surroundings interact to shape our experience of exhibitions, are turning their attention to the galleries of leading museums. How to make displays accessible to children is just one of the problems they are (1) ________ head-on. Visitor testing is routinely used to (2) ________ how visitors are affected by the colours in galleries. It was found that increasing the amount of blue on walls of exhibitions (3) ________ people they could remember more detail. (4) ________, the researchers are also helping museums to produce clearer displays by making reductions in the text and detail they contain. If this is done (5) ________, visitors don't notice the difference from one gallery to the (6) ________. Their study of how we experience museums has already provided some fascinating (7) ________ for curators. The height of labels, the width of corridors, background noise — these all control attention, and people, not surprisingly perhaps, stay longer when in the (8) ________ of friends.