At Colby, I am an art history and chemistry double major minoring in physics, a member of the Museum Student Advisory Board, and a member of Women in Physics. These different interests mean that my mind is constantly trying to make connections between chemistry, art history, physics, and museums. I enjoy the niche topics that lie at the intersection of these fields so this is where I first looked when deciding on an independent research topic for Colby’s Jan Plan, a minisemester between the fall and spring semesters and a fabulous time to take a quick course on campus, study abroad, or conduct research. I was excited to return to a question that I had about art during a physics lecture. In this lecture, I was introduced to fluid dynamics and given a quick peek into the fascinatingly diverse and complicated physics behind how a fluid (including liquids, gases, and crowds of people) moves.
The physics of fluids is a diverse field with applications in hydraulics, aeronautics, and crowd management. The prediction of pedestrian movement is a subtle, but very important, offshoot of fluid dynamics with important implications for safe crowd management. Many studies have postulated and confirmed correlations between fluids and human crowds. One recent study by Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo studied human movement at the start of the 2017 Chicago Marathon and successfully completed a predictive hydrodynamic theory for human movement. Another relevant study was completed by Ioannis Karamouzas, Brian Skinner, and Stephen J. Guy in 2014. The data from this study resulted in a single law that used statistics to anticipate human movement. In short, there is strong evidence and support for the application of fluid dynamics to human crowds in specific scenarios and case studies.
Upon learning about fluid dynamics and its application to crowds of people, I was instantly curious to read any studies applying fluid dynamics to crowds in art museums. Sitting in a physics lecture when this idea struck, I was itching to see if someone in the world had also questioned the ability of fluid dynamics to describe visitor movement in art museums. While I wanted to read any studies if they existed, part of me was excited by the prospect of an opportunity to investigate something new and that part of me was not disappointed. There is no scholarship on this specific research besides one article in Smithsonianmag.com written by Henry Adams, a professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University. The article makes broad claims with very little use of fluid dynamics as justification. Professor Adams admits that he is just conjecturing, but he hypothesizes the importance of this research as a tool for discovering how people interact with art. This article clearly shows the need for more research in this topic.
My goal for Jan Plan was not to quantitatively prove or disprove a relationship between the physics of fluids and visitor movement in art museums; I do not have the necessary coursework, experience, or resources to complete such a study. Instead, my main goal was to investigate whether this research was worth pursuing and if so, where?
Three countries, thirteen cities, twenty-three days, and thirty different museums. In each of these museums I collected data by observing the way people moved through the exhibits and taking notes on the floor plans available in the museums. This was a different methodology than I originally planned; I intended to make preliminary studies based on the floor plans and then create comparisons between the expected and observed flow. Due to a lack of museum floor plans online, I modified this plan to instead use the maps available at the museums. I took my first notes while in each museum, directly onto the floor plans and maps available. I then copied the data into a journal to go over the information a second time and identify patterns or interesting areas of flow.
My conclusion at the end of the month is that a quantitative study of visitor movement through an art museum is worth pursuing. The ability to apply fluid dynamics to crowds has been proven in multiple case studies and I feel that an art museum could be added to this collection. However, not all art museums will lead to visitors exhibiting fluidlike patterns. One of the most important characteristics to warrant a quantitative study is that the museum must be sufficiently crowded to apply fluid dynamics. Fluid dynamics is time dependent, meaning that two visitor paths recorded at different times cannot be related using physics. Each point along a visitor’s path must be compared relative to points on another visitor’s path at that same moment in time. This requirement eliminates many museums as potential options for a quantitative study because many museums do not have enough visitors moving through the same places at the same time.
Over the month, surprisingly few museums had large enough crowds to meet this standard, and often only one special exhibit within the entire museum drew those larger crowds. These exhibits included the Van Gogh special exhibit at the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany; the Monet special exhibit at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands; and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Of these three options, the Van Gogh Museum and the Monet special exhibit in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag are the better options because the majority of visitor movement was in the same direction. These two museums were both built to be museums, and therefore their floor plans were organized with the museum function in mind, resulting in visitor flow with a more specific direction. On the other hand, the Museum Barberini is in a building modified to become an art museum, and therefore many of the exhibition spaces have dead ends that result in visitors moving in both directions, complicating the application of fluid dynamics.
Fluid dynamics may be applicable only in specific museums, but this does not lessen the significance of the correlation when it exists. It is, however, important to acknowledge that not all museums are conducive to crowds moving with fluidlike characteristics. This may be because there aren’t sufficient crowds to study or due to architectural constraints that prevent fluidlike movements of the crowds. Upon further research, there may be more cases discovered in which crowds in museums do not behave according to fluid dynamics, and these scenarios must also be acknowledged.
Why is it important to further pursue the application of fluid dynamics to crowds in art museums? This research has the potential to impact museology by giving mathematically supported explanations of how people move within art museums. Outside of museums, the physical laws that predict human movement are important tools for safe crowd management and effective crowd control. A similar law, perhaps tailored to the data from art museum case studies, could therefore form a basis for new museums and smarter exhibition designs within existing museums.
At the start of Jan Plan, I felt the implications of this research might be only theoretical. It is interesting to postulate how a concrete law predicting human movement through an art museum could be applied to the way people interact with art. However, due to the specific scenarios that enable the application of fluid dynamics in museums, namely crowded popular exhibits, a law that describes the human movement in such an exhibit would do less to describe the way people interact with art and more to explain just how they move in a crowded exhibit. In order to use a mathematical approach to try to describe how people interact with art, perhaps a better course of study would be a quantitative statistical framework in a less crowded gallery.
However, as I reflect on my data collected and observations made during Jan Plan, I also feel that my qualitative observations have helped me gain some insight regarding how people interact with art. Generalizing across all the paths I recorded in the thirty museums I visited, some notable patterns emerge. For example, there are some marked differences in the paths in modern exhibits and those exhibits displaying older works of art. The paths in modern exhibits were often closer to the center of the room, and the paths in exhibitions of older works were often closer to the walls. This leads me to hypothesize that the differing sizes and levels of details in art from different time periods affect the way people move through art museums. I have also observed differences in visitor paths dependent on the amount of text in an exhibit and whether there is a chronological organization to the works of art. From my qualitative observations, I am now questioning how paths may differ in museums that allow photography as compared to those that prohibit it, how tour groups might affect the paths of people not associated with that tour, and how audio guides change the paths of those who choose to use them. Each of these categories of research warrants an investigation and paper to itself.
From my qualitative observations, I see the potential for many different possible research opportunities. I have many more questions now than when I started the semester with a single research question: to what extent does the movement of people through an art museum follow the patterns of fluid dynamics? While I still recognize the benefits from a quantitative study of this original research question, I am now aware that this investigation cannot provide much information about how people interact with art due to the necessary large crowds for the correlation to exist.
During Jan Plan, I gained invaluable experience in research skills and critical analysis of the research process. I feel that because my research took some unexpected turns, I was forced to think critically about my own biases regarding expectations of research. I am grateful I had the opportunity to practice conducting research for a month, and I now feel more prepared for the next time I start a research project. This month of observing how people move through museums will forever have an impact on how I think about museum spaces and the way I walk through an exhibit. After visiting thirty museums abroad, I enjoyed returning to the Colby Museum of Art and walking the familiar rooms with a new point of view.