Diversify your audience!

Audience orientation requires knowledge about visitors and their ways of perceiving things. But how can museums learn about the heterogeneous views of visitors and diversify their image? While empirical research on museum visits is often primarily associated with marketable like increasing visitor numbers, this workshop focuses on the qualitative, formative potential of audience-oriented approaches like audience development. What forms of visitor research are suited for museums of differing sizes? What developments are possible with information on how visitors experience and respond to museums? And how can institutions learn to be more receptive to controversial debates and criticism? Together with international speakers, we will discuss to what extent empirically based research methods are fundamental for a museum’s conceptual orientation towards visitors, and how these are related to strategies of (critical) participation and ideas on outreach.