Exhibition environments and their impact on the audiences

Abstract

The exhibitions facilitate new contexts of learning, communication and experiences. Exhibition environments are increasingly media-focused, incorporating audiovisual and immersive technologies. This change seems to connect with the interest of the public. In order to deepen the understanding of audiences and their perception of cultural impact, an experiment has been carried out with 406 participants in which visitors have been exposed to the same exhibition content displayed in three different formats. An evaluation strategy based on mixed methods has been followed, where the cultural impact of each exhibition format has been analyzed. In addition, the aspects most valued by the public have been evaluated through twelve indicators identified and extracted from the literature. This study confirms that audiences, especially young people, prefer immersive environments; however, when it comes to exposing the same content to the public, the experiment carried out shows that the differences in the cultural impact on the individual are not significant. This fact would indicate that although the new technologies applied to expography are more important as an argument of attraction towards an exhibition, they are not decisive in how the public evaluates the emotional connection, learning, personal reflection, in short, the impact that the exhibition has provoked in the person.