It's time for museums to snap out of their industrial-age mindset, Dr John Falk tells Arminta Wallace

If they're going to survive into the next century, museums and galleries are going to have to change: big-time. That's what Dr John Falk told the Irish Museums Association's annual conference, at the National Gallery of Ireland. Falk isn't talking about putting up bigger signs or having snazzier display cabinets. He's not even talking about interactive screens or the presence of lots of dinky little buttons that visitors can press until the coffee-shop closes. He's talking about a whole new intellectual ball-game - and that's just the good news.

Falk's specialist subject is what is known in the US as "free-choice learning". A former assistant director at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, he is now the founder and president of the Institute for Learning Innovation, and has written a plethora of books and articles on such topics as how we learn outside of school.

Free-choice learning is, in fact, the kind of learning we do anywhere except school. Traditionally we've done quite a bit of it by visiting museums and galleries. But for the museums and galleries of the future, Falk says, the "choice" part of the equation is going to loom larger than a monster on the horizon at sunset.

"For much of the 20th century, here in Ireland as elsewhere," he says, "people were worried about having clothes on their back, food on their table and a roof over their head. Today, the issue is not whether you have clothes on your back, but what kind of clothes. It's not about whether there's food on the table but whether I should do Chinese tonight. Or Italian? Thai would be good. . ."

Thanks to the industrial revolution, we have entered an unprecedented age of prosperity, complete with a keen awareness of the vast panoply of free-choice leisure options open to us. Museums and galleries, however, are still stuck in a time warp. Many of them were set up by the Victorians with the aim of educating the unwashed masses; and that, according to Falk, is how many of them still see themselves.

"The fundamental business model of museums is still rooted in the industrial age," he says. "Top down, mass-production, one-size-fits-all models, as opposed to trying to be more bottom-up and personalised, and trying to meet the needs of the customer."

In some ways, he says, it's about being less like a museum and more like a library. "Museums talk about visitors, or 'guests' as they're now called in the States," he explains. "The implication is that the institution is my house. I'll be courteous to you when you come in, but this is not your stuff - it's mine. Libraries, on the other hand, talk about 'users'. A librarian doesn't begin with the assumption that his or her job is to tell you what books to look at. What happens is, you come in and say, 'I have an interest in such-and-such - can you help me figure out what would be useful to me to read?' That's where the conversation begins."

FALK SAYS HE has spent 30 years of his life trying to figure out why people go to museums, what they do when they get there, and what they take away with them. One of the things he has figured out is that the most crucial element of a museum experience is not what's actually on display inside - or even how it's displayed - but what the visitor expects from his or her visit.

"I'd say to the museum person that this is like discovering the Rosetta stone," he declares. "This is the key to knowing how to meet the needs of your visitors. The bad news, however, is that once you know this, you can't deal with visitors as you've always dealt with them before - as an undifferentiated mass. You have to try to figure out who's who and why they're there."

This can be done by asking visitors a few simple questions when they walk through the door, or even by the clever use of marketing and the internet, before they leave their house. This, says Falk, is where the "free choice" element really comes into play. "There are many, many things challenging for people's leisure time now," he says. "It's about trying to appeal to their interests. But the interesting thing is that people do use institutions to satisfy their needs anyway. They may not know they're doing it, or be able to articulate why they're doing it, but they do it.

"Museums have learned the hard way that as much as you try to structure the visitor experience for people, they will use it in the way that makes most sense to them. So even if you organise it so that people should walk around a particular gallery from right to left, a third of your visitors will still walk around from left to right. If you try to force them all to walk in this entrance, a number will still walk in by the back door. "[ This] means it's not an uphill battle. People have already sensed that this is a place which will fulfil their needs. As an institution, you have to work pretty hard to undermine that."

Needless to say, museums and galleries do undermine it - all the time. One sure-fire way to undermine a museum visit for parents with children, Falk says, is to make it hard to find the bathrooms; or hard to keep track of the children. "Nothing undermines the museum experience for parents more than losing their children. That's a bad gallery day."

So if all that reorienting and changing of mindsets constitutes the good news for cultural institutions, what's the bad news? Not surprisingly, it has to do with money. Falk has a warning for our cash-rich Celtic Tiger institutions. "In a case such as here in Ireland," he says, "where a disproportionate amount of the monies are coming from public funds, everything's great until budgets get tight. And then it's a question of 'Well, let's see. Shall we fund rubbish collection, the hospital, the police department or the museum?' Hmm. I don't think that's a tough choice.

"But that's the playing field museums are on. And if you play on that field, you'd better find out what the rules are. It's not about sitting on the sidelines with your hands on your hips saying: 'They just don't understand me; they don't appreciate how important I am.' You can stand there until you're blue in the face, but that's not going to get you more money. Historically, museums have not had to deliver value to the public. They've been able to get away with being perceived as valuable in their own right. But they won't be able to get away with it for much longer."