From Looking to Doing: An Uncertain Future for Science and Art Museums
Visitation at collections-based museums – science, technology, art, and natural history – has been in steady decline. While the pandemic dealt an obvious blow, the persistence of reduced attendance suggests a deeper problem. The American Alliance of Museums Pulse Survey (2023) found that museum attendance remains, on average, 29% below 2019 levels. Similarly, the TEA/AECOM Global Attractions Report (2023) reported that even the 20 most visited North American museums have recovered only 90% of their pre-pandemic audiences.
Museums are beginning to recognize that this is not a temporary setback but the result of long-term cultural shifts. Chief among these is the dominance of screen-based life. In an era when people already spend hours passively scrolling, watching, and swiping, museums risk irrelevance if they continue to offer primarily static displays. Visitors are increasingly seeking opportunities to do, make, and feel together.
Survey research confirms this.
The COVES 2024 standardized visitor study shows that active engagement directly correlates with higher visitor satisfaction across multiple institutions.
The AAM + Wilkening Annual Survey of Museum-Goers study (2024) reveals that visitors now prioritize fun, relaxation, and social connection over didactic instruction.
IMPACTS Experience data (2023) demonstrates that visitors rate time with friends and family as more than twice as important as the exhibits themselves in shaping a rewarding museum visit.
In other words: if museums remain places for passive looking, they will fall behind in a culture that demands active participation.
Forward-looking museums are already rethinking their centuries-old identity as places to simply “stand and look.” New experiments are emerging to expand the visitor’s toolkit of experiences.
At the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, visitors climb into flight simulators and VR transporter rides alongside the displays of historic aircraft.
The American Museum of Natural History offers its Discovery Room, a hands-on lab where children handle and experiment with real materials.
The Milwaukee Art Museum’s Kohl Art Studio invites visitors to create art projects directly tied to gallery themes.
Institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Newark Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh now offer makerspaces and art labs for tinkering, collaboration, and creative play.
These initiatives represent a growing recognition across disciplines that active engagement is the future of museums.
And yet, the toolkit remains limited. Labs, makerspaces, and simulators are important steps, but too often they are peripheral, tucked away inside rooms rather than integrated into the core visitor journey. If museums are truly to pivot from “looking to doing,” they must adopt a broader, more visible repertoire of active experiences — and they must allow these to take center stage.
That challenge is still unsolved. How can museums move beyond the familiar formulas of art labs and simulators to embrace a wider vision of active engagement? What kinds of monumental, participatory experiences could transform not just the margins but the very heart of collections-based museums?
In my next article, I’ll offer a powerful new solution — one that has the potential to launch museums boldly and decisively into a new era of embodied, participatory culture.
