Designing Museum Experiences - by Mark Walhimer (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Designing Museum Experiences is a how-to book for creating visitor-centered museums that emotionally and intellectually connect with museum visitors, stakeholders, and donors.

Review Quotes

Designing Museum Experiences aims to shift our professional framework to consider the entire ecosystem of the visitor experience. It encourages museum staff to keep our relationship with visitors central to all our thinking in experience creation, and to me this is an essential mindset for all exhibition planners. The book also encourages planners to look broadly at the range of tools, across disciplines, that could be leveraged to help support the work of exhibition creation. I think that students, emergent museum professionals, startup museums, or those looking for ways to reinvigorate their practices and connect more deeply to their audiences may find this book a helpful introduction.

Designing Museum Experiences combines thought provoking ideas on the future of museums with action-orientated advice based on Walhimer's decades of experience in the field. Essential reading for anyone working in museums.

Designing Museum Experiences is what the museum field needs now more than ever. As global communities grapple with a plethora of disruptive issues, centering on meaningful visitor experiences is key to helping our communities navigate it all. Walhimer provides a well-researched, thoughtful, and accessible resource to transition museums (from the inside out) from object-centered organizations to people-centered ones with the same care, academic rigor, and discipline one should expect. With clear descriptions, frameworks, examples, references, and more, this text is well-suited for those working in the field (regardless of level), graduate students, and community planners. It is a must-have if the goal is to have a museum that truly matters for what it does- not what it has.

Mark Walhimer has envisioned the museum of the future as a learning organization that is constantly adapting and changing to meet the needs of its community. The many ideas, tools, and strategies contained in these pages can help museums build more effective visitor-centered experiences and a more sustainable future.

With the rise of today's Experience Economy, museums now compete against all manner of new, engaging, and remarkable experiences. The bar has been raised, and Mark Walhimer shows you how to meet and exceed that bar in designing compelling -- and perhaps even transformative -- museum experiences. Pay attention to the techniques in this book and use the toolbox to, as Mark say, curate not only objects but experiences.

About the Author

Mark Walhimer is a managing partner of Museum Planning, LLC, a museum consultancy, and a part-time industrial design professor.
Walhimer is the founder of Museum Courses, an online platform for online museum courses, and has taught at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia and at Tecnológico de Monterrey and Universidad Iberoamericana, both in Mexico City.
Prior to starting his company, Walhimer held positions at Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California; the Children's Museum of Indianapolis; the Tech Museum in San Jose, California; and Liberty Science Center. He has also been Chief Operating Officer of a museum exhibition design and fabrication firm, and is the author of Museums 101, a how-to guide for creating and organizing all varieties of museums and companion website museums101.com.
Mark Walhimer has been a three-time juror for the United States Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, an American Alliance of Museums Museum Assessment Program (MAP) peer reviewer, and an Institute of Museum and Library Services peer reviewer.
He has a bachelor's degree in studio art from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and a master's degree in industrial design and exhibition design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.