Looking into the Void: Exhibition Design and Communication

Chapter 1 establishes that exhibition experience and related value creation processes are grounded in communication and that exhibit design is foundational for exhibit communication. It highlights the multimedia nature of exhibit design and communication, combining and orchestrating objects, texts, images, sound, space, light, color, and more to offer a platform for visitors to encounter and engage as well as “rhetorics of value” that suggest ways of seeing the world. Finally, it considers changing ways museum visitors and communication have been understood, tracing the emergence of current views of visitors as active participants who bring their own identities and experiences to exhibit interpretation and of communication as an interactive process of meaning creation, not simply information transfer. The chapter ends with an overview of sources used and an outline of the chapters and argument to follow.