What Are Streakers, Strollers, and Scholars?

Will you be at AAM 2026 in Philadelphia this week? Me too! Hit REPLY if you’d like to connect IRL.

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Here’s one of the most helpful principles in the business. (If you don’t know, now you know.)

We could think about our visitors by demographics: age, gender, religion.

We could sort them by psychographics: lifestyle, political affiliation, values.

But in exhibitions, we often sort them by attention span: streakers, strollers, and scholars.

Streakers move fast, not pausing for details. For them, experiences need to communicate at a glance.

Strollers are slower, but moving. They pause for details when they're interested. So they need navigable layers of information.

Scholars need to experience every detail. They try to guess the best way to see everything. So they need logical structure.

Visitors come in all three types — so we should consider them all at once. By the way, a visitor can switch between attention span types while they are with you.

Here’s the thing:
Our experiences work better when they cater to all three types of visitor attention spans: streakers, strollers, and scholars.

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day:
Microclimate. In museums, a space with different environmental conditions than the surrounding area, such as a display case or storage room. Microclimates preserve artifacts by keeping them in ideal conditions to minimize deterioration.