The effect of museums’ internal spaces characteristics upon visitors’ space use patterns: Qatar museums as a case study

Abstract

Visitors' space use pattern in museums is the mechanism by which visitors can understand and comprehend the internal display environment through a series of behaviors that begin with Capture, Navigation and ends by stopping to view display content. To find out the effect of the internal physical environment of the display spaces which consist of (the display containers) represented by the surrounding surfaces and (display content) of exhibits, the organizational characteristics of each one had to be studied to know their impact in these different patterns of space use. The relationship between the patterns of display space use represented by (visitors exploratory movement and stopping to view exhibits) and the internal space characteristics represented by (organizational relationships of display container and content) is a phenomenon that didn't have a great deal of studying despite its role in making the museum experience successful. Accordingly, the research aimed at shedding light on the nature of this relationship through studying a group of neutral display spaces for the display containers with their contents along with their different spatial organization between two of international museums within an interactive approach based on the actual analysis of the visitor behavior by observation and tracking in addition to carrying out syntactical analysis for the display halls in the selected samples with Depthmap UCL software. The results of the practical study showed that the matching between the display container and island display content in the spatial organization raises the learning opportunity and going deeply into the display content as well as stimulating the interaction of visitors through focusing on exhibits on one hand, this interaction with display, on the other hand, towards wall display content increases as much as this matching decreases.