– critical analysis of a transmitter-oriented approach to interpretive planning

Traditionally, planning for information dissemination at heritage sites has focused on deciding which ​​facts should be sent from a transmitter (e.g., the managing authority of a heritage site) to a receiver (visitors). Such a planning process assumes the recipient will simply assimilate the information the transmitter presents - and, by extension – that impacts on the receiver's attitudes and behaviors will necessarily follow. But empirical research does not support this chain of events, a realization that leads many analysts to conclude that this fact-teaching approach to interpretation has served neither the interests of heritage site planners nor those of the people who visit them.

Heritage interpretation may be presented to visitors in many different formats (such as guided tours, exhibitions and digital information). Certain aspects of the heritage relevant to a given site are selected for emphasis and conveyed to visitors through the information presented. Other aspects, however, are inevitably deemphasized or left out altogether, effectively “hiding” them from public consideration. Traditional approaches to planning for interpretation, therefore, run the ethical risk of dictating to Swedish citizens which aspects of their own heritage are worthy of attention.

Traditional approaches to interpretation planning usually emanate from two problematic perspectives:

- A didactic view of the communication process - where the goal of interpretation is often formulated as the participants' ability to remember the facts presented. In this view, interpretation is successful if a visitor can remember, for example, the name of a rock, which year a certain event occurred, the artist who produced a particular sculpture, and so on. Published evaluations of interpretation the past three decades have overwhelming used immediate factual recall by visitors as the main evaluative criteria (Ham 2007, 2013).

- A view of the audience as sponges - wherein visitors exposed to interpretation simply absorb the information they are presented and subsequently adopt attitudes and behaviors consistent with the information they absorbed. This naïve view is based on an empirically disproven model of communication that assumes information is transmitted by a sender topassive receivers. It sees interpretation as something that only an interpreter can do, and therefore assumes that visitors have no role other than to absorb what the interpreter tells them (which is sometimes called a “cybernetic” view of audiences as robots). And it ignores many dozens of published studies showing that audiences actually play a very active role in processing information as it is presented to them—a process that leads them to make their own meanings and arrive at their own subjective understanding of their heritage (Ham 2013, 2014).

To reiterate, these starting points are problematic, partly because research evidence simply does not indicate any relationship between participants' ability to recall the factual content of heritage interpretation and the transmitter’s goals of preserving and perpetuating cultural heritage, and partly because they lead to interpretive practice that is aimed at emphasizing certain selected facts over others rather than stimulating visitors to engage their minds and actively “co-construct” their own heritage.

The widespread adoption of these starting points in interpretive planning leaves the planner uncertain as to whether:

- Interpretation will facilitate participants' meaning making and reflection on the cultural heritage context

- Participants themselves can influence the meaning and values the assign to heritage places constructs and whether the interpretation is contributing to a participatory dialogue about cultural heritage values (a goal most heritage sites probably embrace).

- The objectives that justify society's investment in heritage interpretation will be reached

The aim of the PAKI research project is to develop a model for planning interpretation that goes beyond the “didactic” and “cybernetic” views that have characterized much interpretive planning in the past. We propose a planning model based on a view of interpretation as a communication process in which the participants are seen as equal actors who actively define the situation in interaction with others and create for themselves personal subjective meaning through an interaction between the interpretation they are presented and their own pre-understanding of their heritage and their previous life experience.

Based on this perspective, the model we develop will encourage planners to consider:

- What are the specific goals and mission of their interpretation in terms of the interpretive products and activities they offer and with respect to the reflections and meanings they hope participants will construct in their own minds?

- How the form, content, and social interaction catalyzed by an interpretive product can facilitate (or hinder) meaning making by participants.

- How the form and content of interpretation presented by a heritage site can either reveal or conceal certain contexts and relationships that are potentially relevant, not only to visitors but to the wider community.

- What opportunities participants have to self-check and control which values ​​are reflected in interpretation activities they expose themselves to, and to understand and control how they are affected by the values ​​that are reflected.

Sam Ham. Photo: Barbara Ham, 2014