I started exploring module 6: Hyperlinked Environments expecting a straightforward piece on museum tech, and came out pondering which kind of visitor I actually am.
The reading that stuck with me was Eduardo Araujo Oliveira and Paula de Barba’s “How does learning happen in museums?”, where University of Melbourne researchers strapped Bluetooth beacons around an exhibition and tracked how visitors actually moved through it. Not what visitors said they would do but what they actually did.
A visitor looking at paintings in the Louvre. Image taken from WikiCommons
What really drew my attention was the four-goal framework that was laid out by the authors: mastery, performance, hedonic, and social. After reading this list, I immediately started sorting my own museum visits into it. Honestly, I am mostly a mix of mastery and hedonic. I want to actually understand the thing in front of me, read every label, loop back to a panel I skimmed too fast, but I am doing it because it is genuinely enjoyable, not because I am trying to prove anything.
That is where this connection to the library work showed up in a way I did not expect. People talk a lot about meeting patrons “where they are,” but this reading made that phrase much more concrete. A patron browsing the new books shelf with zero agenda is not failing to engage. They are pursuing a hedonic goal. Just like the museum visitor who just wants a nice hour indoors. If I only design programming and readers’ advisory for the “mastery” patron. The ones who want a curated pathway of related titles, I am quietly excluding everyone else.
The beacon data is also genuinely useful information. Knowing that engaged visitors revisit and disengaged ones skim titles could inform creation and design of signage, wayfinding, even shelving logic.
One thing I did think about was that this data was also a visitor being tracked without, it seems, much say in what happens to that movement data afterward. As someone who is also concerned about the information-ethics side of this field. I want to hold both things at once: this is smart, humane design research, and it is a reminder that “personalization” and “surveillance” are sometimes the same infrastructure wearing different clothes.
I do not have a tidy conclusion. Mostly I am sitting with the question of how I would want a library version of this study to go. Would I want beacons on the stacks?
References
Oliveira, E. A., & Barba, P. de. (2018). How does learning happen in museums? | pursuit by the University of Melbourne. Pursuit. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-does-learning-happen-in-museums
1 Comment
July 9, 2026 at 6:49 am
Hi @chaot ! For me, I think I’d probably label myself as hedonic and social. Wandering around a museum is a fun pastime for me. It’s calm, quiet, and interesting. I also love sharing my experience with my friends. While I lived in LA, I visited a bunch of different art museums and galleries. Every Christmas, I would meet up with a friend and fellow artist of mine when he visited to spend the holidays with his grandfather. Each time we would choose to visit some exhibit, experience, museum, etc., so we could catch up and do something fun. Our last and final visit, before I moved back home, took us to the Broad, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Hammer Museum, all in a single day.
We took plenty of photos, which we shared with our friends on Discord. We got on a call together and then discussed the entire visit, photos included. We like to go over the trip, different exhibits, the quality of art, how we felt, the museum’s architecture, and anything else we can think of. Unfortunately, I don’t think beacon data can determine what your thoughts are or what you do after your visit, so although useful, I don’t know if it gives a full picture of user engagement. I think you bring up a really interesting point on tracking data that I don’t think I fully considered. I know the people in Oliveira and de Barba’s article agreed to the research, but, for me, if I found out I was being tracked in a museum, I might just avoid that museum altogether. This is definitely something I’ll be thinking about going forward.