The role of the imagination in museum visits

Abstract

The imagination plays an important role in museums, today more than ever. Visitors use their repositories of imagination or repertoires to make sense of their encounters with objects and exhibits. In this article, I argue that this initial meaning making, rather than being the end goal of museum interpretation, should be thought of as the point of departure for further, more scientific meaning making. I present a framework developed by Colette Dufresne-Tassé et al. (2006) and show how it can be used to identify the variety of visitor repertoires at work in their imagination processes. I argue that becoming familiar with commonly occurring repertoires is necessary for exhibition designers in order for museums to continue to take their interpretive responsibility seriously, and I discuss how such a familiarisation may affect museum practice. I conclude with some perspectives on the implications of the framework for museum research.