Creating Visitor-Centered Museum Experiences for Adults With Developmental Disabilities: A Collaborative Story

Abstract

Museums have a history of being elitist institutions for educated, upper-class, White audiences. However, in recent decades, many museums have worked to overcome this idea by providing visitor-centered approaches to refocus their efforts and concentrate on the needs and interests of all visitors, rather than the objects on display. One population of visitors that is often overlooked by museums is adults with developmental disabilities. This audience serves as the primary participant group for this qualitative case study, along with their parents or caregivers and museum staff members. By using disability studies as a guiding framework, the participants in this study collaborated with the researcher and museum staff members to document their museum experiences through inclusive artmaking, interviews, discussions, and observations. The purpose of this research was to explore how such collaborations might create more inclusive and visitor-centered museum experiences for adults with developmental disabilities within a small regional local art center. The findings were used to make recommendations for future programming and consisted of several themes developed during the coding process. The themes included understanding, accessibility, interactive, collaboration, communication, and evaluation.