In the chapter “Museums’ Use of Collections and Visitors’ Learning Experiences”, Anna Baccaglini often mentions the isolation of vision as the primary means of transferring information in museums. To study engagement approaches that have failed, I think it’s interesting how museums still lack user engagement even after attempting to incorporate a more diverse range of senses to experience the objects. Baccaglini notes that “rather than a conversational situation between visitors and objects, it appears most of these devices create the same one-way flow of information from museums to visitors and may even distract visitors from engaging with objects.” I think incorporating different sensory information still fails to engage the audience when they are still presented in a one-way manner similar to the one-way flow of an object’s plate text.

Baccaglini also mentions various precedents engrained in museums that may contribute to the failure of new engagement approaches. Baccaglini references Hampton Stevens’ quote that people in museums “cattle-like shuffle past painting after painting.” Baccaglini points these actions towards the lack of simulation in museum audiences, but I believe that this could also be a precedent that is hard to shake out of a museum-goer’s behavior. Even when I feel particularly drawn to a museum object, I linger for a moment and then move on to absorb the rest of the exhibition’s narrative. I perceive museum exhibitions as the collection of pieces and not as individual parts that can be engaged with. It makes me wonder if there’s a balance that can be created between the pieces as their own entity as well as the exhibition as a whole.

Baccaglini’s comment on the elevation of museum objects to a sacred level particularly stood out to me, as someone who personally perceives museum objects like so without realizing it. The way I perceive a piece of art, or even a doodle or text from a friend is very different from the way I perceive an object in a museum, even though both were created by people who had feelings and thoughts as they created them. I wonder if I would connect better to museum objects if I perceived them as products of a person rather than just the object itself?