When informal learning centers serve people with special needs well, they’re serving everyone better. Paul Gabriel has been teaching us this for years, and he’s right. What really brought this lesson home for me was leading a group discussion with parents of children with special needs at the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo (JMZ). Staff recently hosted a community conversation to gain insight as they plan their new exhibit, Curious By Nature.
We talked about many easy ways to support families with special needs, all of which will sound familiar as best practices for experience design. Here are a few of the many points that came up during our talk.
Certainly all learners can benefit from front-end organizers, but children with Autism can have real difficulty functioning without advanced planning and a clear understanding of what to expect. This group of parents imagined a variety of map-based activities that could be downloaded from a museum’s web site prior to the visit. A map of the exhibit can feature icons that represent various activities, or images of exhibit elements for the child to find while on site.
Map ideas naturally lead to scavenger hunts keyed to different abilities. One scavenger hunt suggestion focused not on content, but on senses, e.g., to have children find something bright, something stinky, something rough, etc. One mother in our group responded to the map ideas with this: “I wish my daughter could actually do that. She won’t be able to do any of the pictures or anything like that. She’s more for sound and for music.”
And, thinking about using sound, hand-held audio components can do more than amplify sound for the hearing impaired; they can also narrate action in video presentations for people with visual impairments (something that movie theaters are starting to offer as well).
We know that a good exhibit will engage all the senses, or as many as possible. For any visitor, multi-sensory stimuli encourages engagement and supports learning. For the neurologically atypical visitor with limited senses available to access an exhibit element, like the little girl mentioned above, multiple points of entry can make the difference between being able to engage with it at all, or having to skip it.
For the family with special needs, elements with multiple access points provide a means of social learning and interaction among siblings with varying abilities. This is a subtle but not insignificant need voiced by parents of children with a wide range of special needs. According to one parent in our discussion group, “Often times, when you have the first one as a special kid, you wait a long time to decide to have another one, because it’s a little scary. So I love it when there are activities that match multiple age groups. Maybe activities that have different levels on the same thing, so depending on what the cognitive ability of the child is, [there is something] to interact with.”
Every barrier and support to museum visits mentioned by these families with special needs impact “typical” families as well. The difference is the degree to which families or individuals can go with the flow. Autism, visual impairments, using wheel chairs, even albinism come with challenges that make it harder for families to roll with the punches during an outing.
I have plenty more to say, but I wonder about your experiences with families that have special needs. Have you included them as you design your visitor experiences? What types of accommodations or programs are you offering that are inclusive of special learners?
And here’s the question of the day: what do you think is the single most significant barrier to visiting museums described by these families with special needs?
Resources
- More about the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo
- To read about an interesting workshop where participants did role play to experience museums as though they had special needs, visit the Western Museums Association site.
- For insights about visitors with special needs and visitor comfort check out:
http://experienceology.blogspot.comhttp://stevetokar.wordpress.com/
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Wendy,
Thanks for the post. It’s great that the JMZ is soliciting the opinions of visitors like the folks you were talking with.
In answer to your question, I’d say the single most significant barrier to access is in our minds: it’s our tendency to dichotomize museum visitors, and human beings generally, into “normal” vs. “special” or “handicapped.” This is largely a social construct, as any of us will discover the moment we find ourselves on crutches, in a wheelchair, or in chronic pain or fatigue or confusion because of some illness or injury. Suddenly we’re on the other side of the line and require “special” accommodation. It’s not special — as is inevitable in life, we simply have moved in one direction or another on a continuum of abilities. Some people happen to spend more of their lives on one end or the other of that continuum (or several of them). The best museum/public space design takes that diversity into account, thereby accommodating a wide range of physical, neurocognitive, and other abilities and limitations.
Wendy, thanks for your excellent post. While I agree with everything said above, I would speculate that the greatest single barrier is the lack of a sense of invitation, of welcome, as opposed to a few grudging accommodations. An institution does not need to anticipate all possible needs, if the desire to include as many varieties of visitors as possible is an intrinsic part of the institution’s mission, and is made manifest to visitors.
If families feel comfortable conveying their needs, and expect best efforts to be made, they will feel safer planning a visit.
Thanks, Steve and Beth!
Yes, you’ve both struck on aspects of the biggest barrier for families with special needs. According to our focus group participants, the single most significant barrier to making outings is people. That means other visitors as well as staff and volunteers. I think a lack of welcome, as well as other unsupportive behaviors, stem from perceiving folks as “other.” The parents we talked with are very motivated to help parents of “neurologically typical” children recognize and understand people with special needs. I’ll be posting about this soon – there’s a lot to say!
Wendy,
Great article!
I think one of the more challenging situations parents/teachers face when entering a museum (or any other public institution) with an exceptional child is deciding whether to “fly under the radar” and try to facilitate the visit entirely themselves so that the child is “protected” and gets an adapted experience, or to interface openly with the staff and other visitors, which could become very uncomfortable and difficult, or could prove to be a wonderful experience.
We can plan for and provide front-end organizers, technological tools, special activities, etc. – those are relatively straight-forward, and may make the “fly under the radar” experiences for these families more accessible. But how can we address that initial apprehension that every group with exceptional individuals feels when they walk through the doors: “Will these people understand our situation? How can we find community here without having to explain and emphasize our challenges/disabilities? Are these caring people who will help us find ways to customize our visit, or is this an institution that expects us to find our own way using ’special tools’?”
It takes unusual insight and exceptional communication skills to provide this kind of experience—that goes way beyond special tools for accessibility. How do we develop and offer this level of reassurance, assistance, and individual attention?
Thanks for bringing this topic up. And thanks to Maraya Cornell for posting it to the WMA LinkedIn discussion list…that’s how I found it.
Wendy I loved reading your article…and what you are doing with special needs families..I have been involved in designing interactive exhibit for kids since the early 90’s when I worked for a children’s museum whose design ethic/approach was that when you create accessible experiences for those with limitations/impairments – sight, hearing, movement, etc – you are enhancing the experience for EVERYONE – now, being the parent of a deaf child, who has Noonan’s Syndrome and anxiety disorders, I not only believe this but live this and this has been our firm’s approach on the development of exhibits.
Designing exhibits/museums for this audience, including their families is complex and goes beyond just providing multi-sensory engagement opportunities..thinking about my son, and he having a mom who is a ‘museum junkie’, I must think about not bringing him to museums that are crowded, have lots of exhibits crammed into small galleries, have poor circulation and wayfinding that promote feelings of confusion and loss..these subliminal elements of the museum experience – and these are just a few, can have a powerful impact on people who are simply trying to ”navigate’ through the museum, never mind actually getting to/engaging in an exhibit. I recall my family going to the Experience Music Project when it first opened and finding to our chagrin that everyone needed to have a MEG to carry around! a listening device that you wore around your body so you could ‘engage’ in the exhibits..My husband and daughter spent hours there while my son and I left to play in the park across the street and then headed back to the hotel – at the time a real commentary on the ‘void’ that existed in the development process of a place designed for the ‘general public’.
Just a note about people who are deaf..we often say that we need to design for people within their eyesight, never to put anything of importance above that sight line as people do not look up – it’s uncomfortable, plain and simple. But deaf people move their heads around all over! they use their eyes to tell them most everything about their surroundings…for example my son is always the first to spot the rainbow. It’s these small nuances that we as designers need to be tuned into so that our experiences can be as inclusive as possible for everyone.
As a staff member who participated in this conversation, the biggest take away for me was how eager this community was to contribute their thoughts and how appreciative they were that we “asked at all”. I was struck in early conversations with families by how few opportunities there are for family outings. Museums are often overwhelming experiences. Yet simple accommodations and forethought can ease the stress and create an opportunity for an entire family to share not only an educational experience together, but also a good time!
My other hope for engaging families who have children with special needs was to seek inspiration for sensory exhibits. They did not let us down! They had no shortage of exhibit ideas and creative ways to engage children. It is my speculation that parents who have children with special needs are excellent observers of their child’s behavior and development. This perspective leads to creative ideas for engaging ALL children.
There are a number of museums doing fantastic outreach to this community, for example DuPage Children’s Museum, but there are not enough. I look forward to seeing what our own museum and the greater field does as we all become more inclusive.
I would also add that ASTC has some great accessibility resources on its website.
http://www.astc.org/resource/access/index.htm
Thanks for this great discussion, everyone!
Lydia, I like your “under the radar” analogy. And I agree with you about finessing the type of welcome and communication to effectively connect with and serve special visitors; this is very important.
We spent quite a bit of time on issues of welcoming and receiving visitors with special needs in our conversation with parents. There was agreement that an obvious and matter-of-fact way of offering support is best. These parents look for clear information on web sites, and at the physical entrance, about accommodations and services.
Having a perfect system in place is less important than making an honest, friendly effort. I think Tina described that attitude well in her comments above – these families so appreciated just being asked for their input. In their own words:
“I just have to say, I think I can say for all of us, how much we appreciate you even asking. Just the fact that you asked, even if you don’t accomplish an 8th of what you plan on doing. The fact that you bothered to ask means that this is available to me again. We just have so many places that don’t care or don’t bother. Maybe it’s just benign neglect, but the fact that you asked is really important to us as a community. [all agree] It’s huge.”
One of the parents in the group did comment on how much she appreciates seeing her child’s condition referred to by name. That makes her feel like the institution really understands them, has made the effort to learn about disabilities. This is much more impressive to her than just seeing a wheelchair icon.
Jo Ann, thank you for your very interesting comments and for sharing your real life perspective and experiences. Yes, designing spaces and experiences for all abilities is a comprehensive task and my article hardly even scratches the surface. I’m happy to be a catalyst for this conversation and I am learning so much from good people like you.
I’ll post again next week with more information about our discussion of the social-scape in museums and how that impacts families with special needs.
Thanks again, everybody!
Keep those cards and letters coming in!