Mental Models

We imagine our visitors moving through our exhibitions in the exact experiential order we devise. But visitors that follow every step of our sequence … don’t exist.

Even if our experience were a one-way people-mover chute — like the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London — a visitor can still get distracted, or not care.

It’s not the experiential order that matters anyway. It’s the underlying idea of the order: the mental model.

Libraries are organized by a mental model: the Dewey Decimal System. We don’t find a book by walking through the whole library until we get to that number. We skip, because we know the mental model.

How do we know what’s about to happen in a movie we haven’t seen before? Mental models.

The mental model is what we put in our visitor’s mind. The experiential order is what our visitor does. If they have a strong mental model, they always know where they are in the system.

Here’s the thing:
Visitors never experience our exhibitions in the exact order of our organizing principle. They use the underlying mental model it creates, and make their own decisions.

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day:
Visible storage. A display method in which collection objects are stored in publicly visible, gallery-like spaces rather than in traditional back-of-house storage. These objects are usually densely arranged, typically with minimal interpretation.