Understanding the Exhibition’s Characteristics of Selected Museums in Malaysia

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume III, Issue XI, November 2019 | ISSN 2454–6186

Understanding the Exhibition’s Characteristics of Selected Museums in Malaysia

Norfadilah Kamaruddin

Creative Visual Exchange Group (CREaTE), Faculty of Art & Design, University Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia

Abstract: The literature on the museum studies has primarily focused on the study of cultural and heritage memory with a secondary focus on tourism agenda. Given the extraordinary expansion of the museum sector worldwide in the recent decades, the development of museums exhibition has not yet been examined within the broader of interface design perspectives. Thus, it is an appropriate time to expand this range of analytical concerns by looking in depth on the exhibition characteristics of the so-called ‘new look of museum’. This article seeks to review the exhibition’s characteristics that commonly used in Malaysian museums. The goal is not easily to generate a generic survey or typology of museum displays, but to describe the use of different forms of museum exhibition within the specific characteristics.

Keywords: museum history; museum studies; exhibitions characteristics; interface design.

I. INTRODUCTION

Exhibition is one of the major links between museums and the public. As a communication device, exhibitions make use of a wide variety of interpretive media and one of which is language in the form of exhibitions texts and objects. As such, every exhibition must have a “big idea” where is a sentence or statement of what the exhibition is about. The “big idea” moreover helps the determine what information to convey to the visitor. Imagine that we were selling the exhibition to another person who didn’t know anything about it, how would we describe it? In deeds, the “big idea” provides the focus for the exhibition around which the story, interpretive approaches and museum visitor experiences are built.
When talk about the museum experience from the visitor’s perspective, most literature established that visitor’s experience are based on the interaction among three contexts (visitor-constructed) which are personal context, social context and physical context. Additionally, the personal context incorporates a variety of experiences and knowledge of the individual visitor that includes the visitor’s interest, motivations, and concerns. In depth, every visitor’s perspective is strongly influenced by the social context. This is because of most people who visit museums are commonly in a group, and those who visit alone invariably met other visitors and museum staffs. However, the physical context includes the architecture and ‘feel’ of the building, as well as the exhibits contained within the hall. In summary, Figure 1 show the view of this relationships.

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