Occasionally, a client or community member will say that the outcomes that museums deliver can blend together into a kind of experiential soup. For example:
Can’t people feel a sense of connection with a work of art and can’t that create ‘belonging’? Isn’t that basically the same as ‘feeling a sense of connection and belonging with others’?
This type of question can come up for any number of outcomes, and it’s true that there is arguably some overlap between these different outcomes. After all, it’s easy to imagine someone having their senses heightened (a physical outcome) while also feeling a sense of awe (personal). I’ll stick with the belonging example here because it’s perhaps the one outcome that museum experts are most inclined to water down or redefine as something it is not.
First, what do we mean by ‘feel a sense of connection or belonging with members of my group’?
It’s fairly straightforward. It’s a social outcome. It’s about the museum and its resources being a mechanism for fostering social bonds between people. For whatever reason, people who work in museums tend to want to define the outcome as fostering a connection between people and the museum. These are not the same things. It’s certainly valuable (especially for the museum) for people to feel some sense of connection with the place and the organization. Feeling a sense of intellectual and physical safety is a place-based outcome that is probably foundational or necessary for people to actually achieve other outcomes like building deeper relationships with the family and friends they came with. It’s reasonable to think that it’s harder to build social bonds if you don’t feel physically safe.
But saying that someone feeling a connection to an artifact is more or less the same as building deeper social bonds with the people they already care for waves away an opportunity to be more thoughtful about the value of our work.
One way to see the difference is to ask how you would measure these outcomes.
If you wanted to know whether people who engaged with the museum left feeling more connected to others in their group, how would you measure that? You’d want to understand the character of the exchanges they had with others in the space — either by asking them questions, making observations, or both.
If you wanted to know whether people developed a sense of connection with the content in the museum, how would you measure that? More to the point: Would you ask the same questions or look for the same behaviors as you would if you were trying to measure social connections?
No, you wouldn’t. So, we can’t just say, “Aren’t these really saying the same thing?” and wave it away.
What’s more interesting is why we have this tendency to dismiss these complexities in the first place. There’s something incongruous about museums’ borderline obsession with cultivating ‘Belonging’ and a deep reluctance to specify what it means and sit with the possibility that the institution itself may be a humble vehicle for others to achieve the social outcomes they value rather than the center of the visitor’s universe.
In fairness, I think that the intention is well-meaning. There’s obviously nothing wrong with wanting people to feel welcome at the museum, but much of what makes a place feel welcoming or helps people feel at home comes from care, attentiveness, and friendliness — in other words, service. The service does produce an outcome, but not a social one. Think of a hotel: it isn’t trying to create an experience that demonstrably builds connections between guests. The difference is clear if we allow ourselves enough time to think about it. Given that it is arguably harder to design for social outcomes than to design for individual comfort, we may cheat ourselves of an opportunity to reach for a higher bar when we call all user outcomes more or less the same. Hotel managers don’t try to elevate good service to some higher ideal. They don’t create conferences devoted to belonging. That’s because hotels aren’t reaching for social impact. They’re trying to provide advantageous customer service and experience. Museums can, and arguably should, reach for something more. When we dress up good service or brand affinity as belonging, we really do ourselves a disservice, not to mention the people we’re trying to support.
The next time you’re feeling tired and inclined to just sweep all these value-oriented questions into the garbage, declaring that it’s all basically the same, and returning to Being Busy, try asking yourself: How would we know if someone felt outcome x vs y? Would we ask or observe the same things if we wanted to understand whether someone felt a sense of awe vs. whether someone’s physical senses were heightened? If a funder walked in tomorrow and said, “Can you show me that you produce x or y outcome for people in our city?” would you say, “Look, it’s all basically the same”?
Have a good weekend,
— Kyle