Touch, Taste, Smell: Fostering Museum Visitor Engagement with Multisensory Spaces

Author: Kirsten Brown Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 25 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018) Raw file: raw/chapters/brown-2018-touch-taste-smell-multisensory-museum.md

Summary

Brown's chapter (the Reader's twenty-fifth) argues that the museum began multisensory and was made ocularcentric by policy, technology and aesthetics — and that contemporary exhibit design is re-opening the sensorial archive. In their earliest iterations (Wunderkammern), museums "encouraged a multidimensional encounter with objects": visitors were guests free to examine with "their own eyes, hands, ears, and noses, and sometimes even to take a taste," since deep understanding "required a multisensory investigation engaging space." Growing audiences, preservation policy, the advent of electric lighting (which "allowed visitors to observe objects clearly from a distance"), and a modern-era "aesthetic shift… plac[ing] total importance on sight-based discourse" combined into "almost universal sensorial neglect in exhibit design." Against this, the chapter surveys the contemporary re-sensorialization of the museum interior through three registers — touch (gloved handling at the Uffizi; supervised study rooms; the living-history touch of Old Sturbridge Village; Touching the Prado's 3D-printed tactile paintings for blind and partially sighted visitors), taste (the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian; the Southern Food and Beverage Museum's community kitchens), and smell (Sissel Tolaas's Smellscape Central Park Autumn 2015 at the Cooper Hewitt; The Art of Scent at the Museum of Art and Design) — arguing that "innovative methods of incorporating sensorial stimulation into interior spaces… have a calculated, direct impact on how visiting audiences interpret and relate to the subject matter," and closing on the designer's responsibility to "create exhibit spaces where visitors can not only observe but also participate in meaning-making."

Pagination note: the raw file carries no page numbers; quotations from works Brown cites (Howes, Lacey & Sathian, Mihalache, Keller, Drobnick, Stevenson, Simon, Zisch/Gage/Spiers, McGinnis, Hollein, Beneker) are attributed per the chapter's own notes, quoted in Brown.

Key Claims

The museum's origin was multisensory: Wunderkammern presented collections for study and enrichment with "a multidimensional encounter" — guests examined objects "with their own eyes, hands, ears, and noses, and sometimes even to take a taste" (Howes, quoted) — and multisensory investigation was "taken for granted" as the method of deep understanding.
The sensorial foreclosure had three causes: handling policies adopted for preservation as audiences grew; electric lighting, "which allowed visitors to observe objects clearly from a distance" (lighting as an instrument of sensorial exclusion); and "an aesthetic shift in the modern era [that] placed total importance on sight-based discourse" — together producing "almost universal sensorial neglect in exhibit design."
Design's interpretive efficacy is the chapter's thesis: "Innovative methods of incorporating sensorial stimulation into interior spaces used by museums to exhibit collections objects have a calculated, direct impact on how visiting audiences interpret and relate to the subject matter."
Institutions are "beginning to 'challenge the restrictive politics of the modern museum'" (Ione, quoted); Nina Simon's participatory-museum programme supplies the frame: "design decisions can help them successfully achieve content and experience goals… developing participatory experiences in which visitors create, share, and connect with each other around content."
Zisch, Gage & Spiers cognitive-claim: "As we experience a museum our brain constructs its own internal museum of the mind… This process is fundamentally guided by the architecture of the space and its influence on our perceptions and expectations."
Touch is cognitively additive, not substitutive: "Many brain regions previously considered to be specialized for various aspects of visual input are now known to be activated during analogous tactile or haptic… tasks… when feeling an object, one naturally imagines what it looks like" (Lacey & Sathian, quoted) — "Touching an object does not exclusively contribute to the touch sensation; it adds a layer to visual sensation as well."
The object's surface is a narrative text read by touch: "The feel of the object's surface (tool marks, damage, blemishes, areas worn from repeated use) brings to life the narrative of its life, context, and cultural value."
Museums facilitate touch through a spectrum of spatial methods: gloved contact with Renaissance sculpture (Galleria degli Uffizi); supervised study spaces that "more closely resemble libraries or laboratories than exhibit galleries" (university collections, the Musée du Louvre); and living-history environments — Old Sturbridge Village's freestanding period structures with authentic artifacts (1790–1840) and costumed "villagers" — where visitors "participate in it, rather than simply observing it via a series of independent objects on display in a formal exhibit."
Touch is accessibility's medium: "The perspective of visitors who are blind or partially sighted, a group often excluded or marginalized by art museums, is significant in drawing attention to the richness of experience beyond the visual museum" (McGinnis, quoted). Touching the Prado (Museo del Prado, Madrid, 2015) used "the latest three-dimensional printing technology in collaboration with experts in visual impairment" to render six genres of the permanent collection touchable, with braille didactics and audio guides, aiming at "bringing a heightened degree of artistic-aesthetic creative enjoyment."
The Prado's exhibit design repurposes the white cube from within: the gallery "appears to evoke the typical 'white cube,' but upon closer investigation, the intent behind its simple design is revealed" — works on "slightly angled platforms… at a natural height and distance… at arm's reach rather than safely hung out of reach," braille-and-text didactics, pedestals "at regular intervals to encourage a clear, unobstructed, natural flow," water bowls for service dogs: "Every detail of the exhibit space was designed with the target audience in mind."
Sighted visitors gain too (Howes): "Sighted visitors found their experience of a painting to be enriched when they were able to simultaneously view and explore a painting manually with the aid of a tactile model" — touch "fosters a meaningful connection between the visitor and the subject matter and, by extension, a connection between the visitor and the museum."
Taste carries "layers of social, cultural, and even political meaning"; ingredients and recipes "serve as hallmarks of culture and identity, evoking memories of people, places, and experiences" — yet "food's own materiality as an object with educational potential has rarely been explored" (Mihalache, quoted).
The museum cafe is being reinterpreted "as an integral contributor to meaningful engagement": at the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe (NMAI, Washington DC) — mitsitam, "Let's eat!" in the Delaware and Piscataway languages — five food stations "depict regional lifeways related to cooking techniques, ingredients, and flavors found in both traditional and contemporary Native dishes," with a custom-built fire pit for cooking demonstrations and an interior (curvilinear forms, vertical cedar paneling) developed "in an ongoing conversation with Native American communities from across the Western hemisphere."
Restaurants are "an extension of the museological space" able to "educate and encourage visitors to think reflectively about what they eat and how their taste constructs stereotypes and ideas about other communities and cultures" — taste "can be educated by the self and by the larger social, political, and cultural contexts" (Mihalache, quoted).
Whole museums can be built around taste: the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (New Orleans) pairs its culinary-history galleries with "working kitchens where members of the community can partake in programming" — "Much as the kitchen is the social center of the home, the kitchen is also the social center of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum" — enacting Hollein's thesis that "the role of the museum is generally in the process of being restructured as far as both tasks and content are concerned, as are its relations with the public."
Smell is the most under-exploited sense: museums "have only recently begun to exploit the value of smell in their exhibits" (Stevenson: "moving toward an appreciation that people have more than one sense – vision – and that the other senses can be productively employed"), yet smells "facilitate the recollection of memories, emotional response, and a multidimensional impression of a place, object, or experience."
Sissel Tolaas's Smell, The Beauty of Decay: Smellscape Central Park Autumn 2015 (Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, 2016) — scent-infused wall paint holding sampled Central Park "smell molecules," released by friction — aims to "arouse memories, recreate place, capture seasonality, and stir emotional and intellectual responses"; curator Andrea Lipps: "You see that it is really a scientific process with molecules in a very sterile context… The exhibition itself is trying to challenge visitors to approach design and experiences with objects with much more sensitivity."
Smell resists curation: "people form all types of personal associations and judgments about smells from… their personal experience," and "smells are more difficult to stably position in space than visual objects" (Keller, quoted) — scent must preserve authenticity, transmit effectively, and avoid "interfere[nce] with other nearby smells."
Scent can be an autonomous artwork: The Art of Scent (Museum of Art and Design, New York, 2013; gallery by Diller Scofidio + Renfro) sought to "recognize and celebrate scent as a true artistic medium rather than just a consumer product" — twelve commercial fragrances (Chanel No. 5, 1921; Daniela Andrier's Untitled, 2010) presented in a "nearly empty gallery space" that strips "the enormous industry based around designing and marketing commercial fragrances" whose "extraneous characteristics can also shape our perception of the scent, and sometimes even shape the scent itself"; visitors lean into a "dimple" that releases a scent burst from a hidden machine, the fragrances "specially modified to resist sticking on skin or clothes" to prevent cross-contamination.
The closing synthesis assigns each sense its interpretive work: touch "allows for a deeper understanding of materials and helps the visitor to develop a sense of ownership of their experience of museum objects"; taste "bridges the gap between personal experiences – each of us tastes food differently and intimately at a biological level – and collective meanings and values"; smell "takes advantage of unusual psychological properties linked to personal experiences to invoke an emotional reaction or connection to the subject matter" — multisensory exhibits "induce a sense of being part of the thing in question" (Beneker: exhibitions' value "lies not within the museum walls, but in how much the visitor takes with him when he leaves").
The disciplinary conclusion: "Museums, curators, and designers must consider spatial construction and their responsibility to create exhibit spaces where visitors can not only observe but also participate in meaning-making."

Connections

Concepts: multisensory-museum · smellscape · participatory-museum · taste-full-museum · white-cube · olfaction · heterosmia · aromatopia · narrative-space · symbiotic-spaces · exhibitionary-complex · memory · embodiment · optic-haptic-perception · sensorial-interior-landscape · interior-architecture · 3d-printing · taste · atmosphere · everyday-life · interiority

Authors: brown-kirsten · marinic-gregory (editor) · discussed in text: Nina Simon, David Howes, Irina D. Mihalache, Andreas Keller, Sissel Tolaas, Simon Lacey & K. Sathian, Fiona Zisch/Stephen Gage/Hugo Spiers, Rebecca McGinnis, Hans Hollein, Richard J. Stevenson, Jim Drobnick ("The Museum as Smellscape," cited), Robert Barthes (cited), Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Debates: power-and-space (the no-touch policy as spatial power; the participatory relaxation) · truth-and-illusion (the purity apparatus: engineered unmediation in the stripped gallery) · interior-design-vs-architecture (the participatory criterion) · phenomenology-vs-psychoanalysis (smell's involuntary recollection as the unconscious channel)

Related source notes: Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the museum's smell-regimes (anosmia, heterosmia, aromatopia) of which Brown's exhibits are the built cases · Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the Reader's sibling sensorial chapter: the grotto register against the white cube · Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — the museum as narrative space and identity machine; Brown's community-center museum is its participatory counterpart · The Museum as Destination (Skot-Hansen 2018) — the museum's urban-economic role; Brown adds the sensorial-interior dimension the destination-museum literature omits · Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the museum as public interior; access as a right

Direct Quotes

"In their earliest iterations, museums encouraged a multidimensional encounter with objects. Visitors were treated as guests, with the freedom to examine objects with their own eyes, hands, ears, and noses, and sometimes even to take a taste." (Howes, quoted in Brown)

"It was taken for granted that deep understanding of an object – its history, its purpose, its context – required a multisensory investigation engaging space."

"These more restrictive policies were facilitated in part by the advent of electric lighting, which allowed visitors to observe objects clearly from a distance."

"Later, an aesthetic shift in the modern era placed total importance on sight-based discourse, further eliminating the non-visual senses from the museum experience. These circumstances combined to result in almost universal sensorial neglect in exhibit design."

"Innovative methods of incorporating sensorial stimulation into interior spaces used by museums to exhibit collections objects have a calculated, direct impact on how visiting audiences interpret and relate to the subject matter."

"design decisions can help them successfully achieve content and experience goals … developing participatory experiences in which visitors create, share, and connect with each other around content." (Simon, The Participatory Museum, quoted in Brown)

"As we experience a museum our brain constructs its own internal museum of the mind… This process is fundamentally guided by the architecture of the space and its influence on our perceptions and expectations." (Zisch, Gage & Spiers, quoted in Brown)

"Buzzing alarms, physical barriers, and watchful guards are all employed to maintain a safe distance between the object and the visitor."

"Many brain regions previously considered to be specialized for various aspects of visual input are now known to be activated during analogous tactile or haptic (passive or active touch, respectively) tasks … when feeling an object, one naturally imagines what it looks like." (Lacey & Sathian, quoted in Brown)

"Touching an object does not exclusively contribute to the touch sensation; it adds a layer to visual sensation as well."

"The feel of the object's surface (tool marks, damage, blemishes, areas worn from repeated use) brings to life the narrative of its life, context, and cultural value."

"The perspective of visitors who are blind or partially sighted, a group often excluded or marginalized by art museums, is significant in drawing attention to the richness of experience beyond the visual museum that a museum can offer." (McGinnis, quoted in Brown)

"At first glance, the gallery appears to evoke the typical 'white cube,' but upon closer investigation, the intent behind its simple design is revealed."

"Every detail of the exhibit space was designed with the target audience in mind."

"Sighted visitors found their experience of a painting to be enriched when they were able to simultaneously view and explore a painting manually with the aid of a tactile model." (Howes, quoted in Brown)

"While taste and its signifier, food, have been present in museums for quite some time as subjects of different works of art, artful dishes in restaurants and cafes, food's own materiality as an object with educational potential has rarely been explored." (Mihalache, quoted in Brown)

"the overall museum experience becomes more participatory, multisensorial, and more engaging for the visitor" (quoted in Brown, after n. 11)

"Restaurants are an extension of the museological space with the ability to 'educate and encourage visitors to think reflectively about what they eat and how their taste constructs stereotypes and ideas about other communities and cultures.'"

"The landscape flows into the building, and the environment is who we are. We are the trees, we are the rocks, we are the water. And that had to be part of the museum" (Hayden, quoted in Brown)

"the role of the museum is generally in the process of being restructured as far as both tasks and content are concerned, as are its relations with the public." (Hollein, quoted in Brown)

"Much as the kitchen is the social center of the home, the kitchen is also the social center of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum"

"taste … can be educated by the self and by the larger social, political, and cultural contexts." (Mihalache, quoted in Brown)

"smells facilitate the recollection of memories, emotional response, and a multidimensional impression of a place, object, or experience."

"moving toward an appreciation that people have more than one sense – vision – and that the other senses can be productively employed to enhance patrons' experience." (Stevenson, quoted in Brown)

"arouse memories, recreate place, capture seasonality, and stir emotional and intellectual responses" (Tolaas, quoted in Brown)

"You see that it is really a scientific process with molecules in a very sterile context… The exhibition itself is trying to challenge visitors to approach design and experiences with objects with much more sensitivity." (Andrea Lipps, quoted in Brown)

"smells are more difficult to stably position in space than visual objects." (Keller, quoted in Brown)

"recognize and celebrate scent as a true artistic medium rather than just a consumer product."

"exhibitions should enrich and enlarge the life of the person, child or adult, who sees them. Their value lies not within the museum walls, but in how much the visitor takes with him when he leaves." (Beneker 1958, quoted in Brown)

"Touch allows for a deeper understanding of materials and helps the visitor to develop a sense of ownership of their experience of museum objects. Taste 'bridges the gap between personal experiences – each of us tastes food differently and intimately at a biological level – and collective meanings and values.' Smell takes advantage of unusual psychological properties linked to personal experiences to invoke an emotional reaction or connection to the subject matter."

"Museums, curators, and designers must consider spatial construction and their responsibility to create exhibit spaces where visitors can not only observe but also participate in meaning-making."

Open Questions

Does the multisensory museum escape Drobnick's aromatopia critique — or complete it at a higher register? Tolaas's synthetic wall-scent and the MAD fragrances "specially modified to resist sticking on skin or clothes" are precisely the engineered, synthetic scent Drobnick warned of — now in art-museum galleries. Is The Art of Scent aromatopia's escape from its "populist confinement" (Drobnick's open question) or its most sophisticated instance?
Is the Prado's white-cube gallery the paradigm's refusal or its most complete form? The chapter shows the white cube's sparse apparatus (bare walls, regular pedestals, unobstructed flow) redesigned for blindness and touch — purity retained, exclusivity inverted. Does inclusive design redeem the white cube, or does the cube survive as a template any program can occupy?
Can smell be "directed… into a desired narrative" at all, given that "people form all types of personal associations and judgments about smells from… their personal experience" — is the multisensory museum's meaning-making designed, or merely made available (emergent, visitor-authored)?
Zisch, Gage & Spiers's "internal museum of the mind" — is the brain's museum designable (architecture "fundamentally guid[ing]" memory-construction) or only hostable? Can a museum design for the memory its visitors will construct without scripting it?
The chapter frames the no-touch policy as mere conservatism; read through power-and-space, is the touchable museum a redistribution of spatial power (authority to the visitor's body) or its internalization — the visitor disciplined into participatory self-direction (cf. Drobnick's authority-inversion)?
The living-history register (Old Sturbridge Village) promises immersion — "to participate in it, rather than simply observing" — but immersion in a staged past: where does the multisensory museum's authenticity lie, in authentic objects (the artifacts) or in designed experience (the re-enactment)?