An exploration of social photography in a visitor museum experience: Understanding engagement and communication through a mixed methods study incorporating service design

The widespread use of social media and digital cameras in people’s daily lives has reshaped how visitors experience museums. The continuous development of smartphones with built-in cameras has encouraged more and more people to use photography to engage with exhibition content, to document their museum experiences, and to communicate their thoughts about these experiences. The museum experience has been transformed even more dynamically through the ability to share photos via social media. Visitor photography is increasingly becoming an important part of the museum experience, but limited research has been conducted to investigate this phenomenon. This research, thus, sets out to understand how visitors use Instagram to convey information about their museum social photography experiences at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London.

In order to comprehensively explore and understand visitors’ social photographic behaviours in the museum visiting experience, mixed methods research was designed to explore this phenomenon from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Additionally, service design methods were employed to facilitate the research process, further interpret the collected dataset, and gain an in-depth understanding of this complex issue from a design perspective. Overall, the research findings revealed how and why visitors captured and shared these photographs to communicate information about their museum experiences, as well as what roles visitors’ social photography play in the museum experience. In the process of exploring visitors’ photographic engagement with museum context and with other visitors, the stakeholders and the complex online and offline interactions they formed within this museum experience were analysed and discussed. More importantly, by integrating different findings from quantitative and qualitative studies, a theoretical framework was proposed to coherently and systematically explain the correlation between social photography and the fundamental components that constitute a museum experience. Collectively, the research findings can be used to inform current museum practice and provide an alternative research approach for exploring social photography and museum experience related studies.