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Hi All 
 
Beverly Serrell, who has extensively studied time at exhibits has a paper, 
"Are They Watching?: Visitors and Videos in Exhibitions" in Curator, 45/1, January 2002, pages 50-64.
which looks at similar issues.
 
She also suggests looking into the Active Prolonged Engagement research being done at the Exploratorium.  
Joshua Gutwill and others just presented a paper on that at the Visitor Studies Conference last week.  A book is coming out soon and will be available through ASTC or through the Exploratorium.  
 
 
Linda Wilson 
Manager, Audience Research and Evaluation 
John G. Shedd Aquarium 
1200 S. Lake Shore Drive 
Chicago, IL 60605 
[log in to unmask] 
PH (312) 692 3261 
FAX (312) 939-8677 


Dave, I've long had a "by guess and by golly" rule that we should try to
have
every experience come available to a new person every 90 seconds. So, a
three minute experience should be twinned, etc.

I arrived at that by timing how long people would wait before they showed
signs of impatience, or moved on to another exhibit. It was rather
unscientific;
I did not have a statistical sample.

Like you, I'd be interested to hear what others think of this matter, and
if there
are good measurements.

Marty, for multimedia exhibits, there are several examples of a request,
after
x minutes or a complete cycle, to let someone else use the exhibit.

Regards, Peter Anderson



From: Jonah Cohen [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2005 1:01 PM
Subject: Re: Popular exhibits


ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************

In James Gleick's "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything", he
theorized that the modern device which most test our patience is... the
elevator. (So, how often do YOU hit an already lit call button, knowing full
well that this does absolutely nothing?)

Anyhow... Personally, I'd be reluctant to set any hard + fast rules for how
long a time limit you'd want to recommend for a given exhibit apparatus. I
can think of plenty of them where visitors can and hopefully will explore +
test it out for much longer than 90 seconds. (That's a good thing, right?)

Perhaps the solution is in the overall layout of the center. If you know
that component X is very popular, scatter a lot of other things nearby so
that rather than standing around waiting, visitors can try something else
and come back to X. In very heavy visitation periods, you can call on your
floor staff to bring some extra experiments to the area to keep people
occupied.

In theory,
Jonah Cohen
Outreach & Public Programs Manager
Science Center of Connecticut







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