An exhibition you could touch, smell, hear and taste raised awareness about elephants — and was still remembered a year and a half later

Conserving the Thai elephant is an issue that has proved hard to promote. This study tried an arts exhibition designed to engage all five senses and asked how strongly visitors' sense of having “interacted” with the work related to their reported increase in awareness — and how long the experience stayed in memory.

A two-day exhibition, “The Elephant tales”, on 12–13 March 2020 in a community mall near the university, with around 300 visitors. Beyond visual work it included three sculptures to touch, a forest scent, recorded elephant sounds and ice cream flavoured with fruits elephants prefer. It was promoted through 30 Instagram influencers with more than 5,000 followers each. Study 1: a post-visit questionnaire completed by 231 visitors (54.5% students aged 19–27) measuring perceived interactivity and raised awareness. Study 2: telephone interviews with six visitors in November 2021, about a year and a half after the event.

• Visitors rated both very highly: perceived interactivity averaged 4.68 and raised awareness 4.66 out of 5.
• The two were moderately to strongly related: r = 0.64 (95% CI 0.56–0.71; Kendall's τ = 0.62). The more interactive visitors found the exhibition, the more they reported their awareness had increased.
• A year and a half later, everyone interviewed still remembered the visuals and the taste. Five of six recalled the elephant sounds; only one of six recalled the scent.
• What departed from an ordinary exhibition is what stuck. The ice cream and the touchable sculptures were raised unprompted, which the authors explain through the von Restorff effect — items that stand out from their context are remembered better.

For communicating environmental issues that people “know about but don't feel”, involving the body — touching, tasting, hearing — builds memories that outlast looking at pictures and reading captions, and the cost is modest: this ran for two days in a retail space. A large group of micro-influencers drew around 300 visitors. One immediately usable observation: smell was the least remembered sense, so if you invest in it, make it far more prominent.