Eva Insulander, currently completing a doctorate in didactics, is researching how people proceed through an exhibition and how visiting couples communicate with each other at exhibitions. She is also looking at what visitors find most interesting about an exhibition and what they remember afterwards.
By collating this information it becomes possible to see how different people deal with the learning process and, as an exhibitor, I can then make use of this knowledge in my work. I can design the learning process by staging it in the room.
There is a wide field of research known as social semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice. Thus language is merely a system of symbols.
The theory is based on the notion that learning is part of a communicative process in which there is not a sender or a receiver but that the learning setting and a representation of knowledge (e.g. an exhibition), and that something is being offered to visitors. The visitor can then choose whether to accept the offer and determine how she or he wishes to relate to it. Learning takes place in this process but it is not a situation in which I know something that I can then transmit to you or that learning involves the transmission of a specific knowledge.