Evaluating emotional triggers

The organisation I work for asks a question of it’s visitors, along the lines of “how strongly do you agree or disagree with the statement ‘this place had a real emotional impact on me’?” We can see that the more people agree with that statement (even if only the minority strongly agree), the more likely people are to have a very enjoyable day, and recommend a visit to friends and relations. But we don’t really measure what drives that emotional response.

I asked a similar question when evaluating Ghosts in the Garden, and I experienced a familiar sense of frustration about how little insight it allowed me. So I plan to work out a set of questions that might be more informative about what drives an emotional connection with a place.

I’m going to start by looking in more detail at this thesis by Mohd Kamal Othman, which I first heard about at the CDH conference in July. Othman was evaluating mobile experiences, and in doing so created a Museum Experience Scale and an Church Experience Scale (one of the projects he was evaluating was a mobile guide for Churches).

I’m particularly interested in the questions the evaluation asked to measure what he termed “emotional connection”:

  • The exhibition enabled me to reminisce about my past
  • My sense of being in the exhibition was stronger than my sense of being in the real world
  • I was overwhelmed with the aesthetic/beauty aspect of the exhibits
  • I wanted to own exhibits like those that I saw in the exhibition
  • I felt connected with the exhibits
  • I like text-based information as supporting material at museum exhibitions
  • I felt spiritually involved with the church and its features
  • I felt connected with the church and its features
  • I felt emotionally involved with the church and its features
  • I felt moved in the church
  • The church had a spiritual atmosphere
  • My sense of being in the church was stronger than my sense of being in the rest of the world

Now it strikes me that the church specific questions are a little less specific than the ones created for exhibitions, but I’ve not yet read about the reasoning behind them. Some of the questions though (touching on presence, spectacle and acquisition, for example) resonate with what I’ve been discovering about emotional triggers in games. I feel there’s something here to build on.

(Now, I better get back to writing that presentation for Decoding the Digital)


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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