The Playing Visitor

Open your browser. Type “museum visitor images.” Press Enter... What you get is a sea of images depicting people looking, spectating, and observing artworks and objects, often in solemn spaces with lofty ceilings. These visuals persist despite highly influential frameworks that argue for more nuanced understandings of visitor agency (cf. Falk, 2009; Packer and Ballantyne, 2016; Simon, 2010). This portrayal is anchored in what Doering and Pekarik (1996) call the “entrance narrative”, a preconceived framework that functions as a “museum script” (Moscardo, 1996) and is often reinforced by the authorized heritage discourse (Smith, 2006). Such scripts condition museum visiting to prioritise observation over other forms of engagement.

At the National Museum of Denmark, we want to challenge and change this stereotypical image radically by inspiring our visitors to play. Not only children, but also young people and adults. And not play merely for the fun of it, but grounded in research highlighting the potentials of play for visitor experiences (e.g., Bustamante et al., 2020; Holdgaard and Olesen, 2023; Letourneau et al., 2017; Olesen and Holdgaard, 2024), as well as learnings from institutions that have foregrounded playful visitor behaviour (e.g., Eberle, 2016; Lester, Strachan, and Derry, 2014; Piscitelli and Penfold, 2015).

But how do you challenge such an ingrained stereotype and inspire playful change within an almost 200-year-old institution spanning eight dissimilar visitor sites? In this paper, we present a large-scale research and design programme in which visitor studies, practice-based experimentation, and engagement are central components. We introduce “the playing visitor” as both a concept for theorising museum visiting and a strategic ideal, outline our methodological approach, and discuss our preliminary findings.