ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of an approach in exhibition experience design to evoke–and perhaps provoke–emotional experiences for visitors. The ultimate purpose of an exhibition is to foster connectivity and meaning-making, and it is objects, as the primary elements of the exhibition experience, that serve to illustrate, explain, captivate, and enable the visitor to relate to the content in a way that is personally significant. The chapter focuses on possibilities for finding and developing the healthful middle ground between passive museum experiences and intensely overwhelming ones. Museums encourage visitors to examine their roles within society, their relationships to history and its juxtaposition with the present, to make active use of memories, identities, and a multitude of personal expressions. Bringing a therapeutic perspective into the work of museums–particularly with objects and object interactions–requires consideration of how best to care for staff and the museum organization as a whole.
