The Philadelphia Zoo

Experience designer

The zoo for me is a place to contemplate human-ness and to imagine alternatives to experiencing life as we do. I believe the zoo offers every visitor enormous potential for imaginative and empathetic experience, but is the potential fulfilled?

For years, zoo apps, kiosks, and even games have been designed around technology. Of course, things should be the other way around—the technology should be designed around the experience, especially in an environment rich with biodiversity.

A paradigm shift was needed. We had to shift from information-dissemination to heartfelt, active learning. We needed to engage visitors with compassionate comprehension. Live-action games where visitors could role-play as animals would make this possible. These kinds of experiences would harness emotion and physicality instead of resorting to the same old "cutting-edge technology" sales pitch or dry information dumps.

Role-play is fun and enlightening, and can be integrated in degrees of subtlety into an experience. Animal role-play presents a unique opportunity to inject human experience with a sense of empathy, comprehension, and compassion for animals. I thought I might take my design in that direction. Others had integrated role-play in the past—but how successful were those experiences as a result? I dug deep to find similar experiences and discovered that some did better than others.

Using the above scale of ten metrics as a guide, I began to plan a completely new kind of design. I established the Philadelphia Zoo as my target client and filmed interviews and observation sessions at the zoo with three families including children and women 25-35—the prime demographic according to the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.

Transcribing the footage, I found 177 raw insights, which I consolidated into contextual models of the common activities and perceptions of all participants.

Where everyone goes

What everyone says

What everyone thinks

Bonus: zoo app issues

Data speaks a cold-blooded language. I needed to translate my data back into direct, compelling statements of visitors’ desires, so I organized their comments into an affinity diagram.

Affinity stickies from a distance

I found that on the positive side, my participants cherished unique opportunities to observe, imitate, and understand animal traits and behaviors. For example, the Philadelphia Zoo’s Lorikeet Experience was animal interaction at its finest.

Lorikeet Experience

Transcripts: guests want to connect

On the negative side, participants felt that on-site technology and some exhibits were not adult-friendly or interactive enough, and worried that they distracted from engagement in the zoo experience and development of interest in animal welfare.

Inspired by the common desires and themes I unearthed, I brainstormed twenty possible design solutions. Some were new services, while others were improvements to existing ones.

Sifting through solutions

Comparing the potential impact of each brainstorm to its achievability, I integrated several brainstorms into a composite solution. AnimalConnection would be a suite of interactive, sensor-enhanced, animal role-play experiences.

Zoo visitors have a strong and unmet desire for empathetic experiences among the current sea of exhibits, on-site technology, and mobile apps that focus on factual learning and conservation. But it doesn’t have to stay that way—today’s technology allows us to augment and manipulate our experience of reality in ways that can simulate animal experience.

We need only combine smartphones or inexpensive Arduino processors with environmental sensors that detect changes in light, sound, motion, and other physical elements. Sounds can be altered in real time, lights can be triggered, and entire systems can be set in motion by the flick of a finger or the step of a foot. With some creative experience design, an inconspicuous space can be transformed into a pseudo-habitat for human exploration.

I created a suite of immersive games with sensors, and my bat experience moved testers to empathize not only with bats but also with the blind. Here’s an overview of the design:

A participant enters a pitch-black space holding a sensor that transmits different audio or haptic feedback corresponding to the participant’s distance from obstacles, prey, and her cave.

The participant is briefed on the details of her scenario: She is a Mexican Free-tailed Bat who has just given birth and must leave her cave in the Guadalupe Mountains to find a flying insect to eat so she can make enough milk to feed her baby upon return.

The participant learns that Mexican Free-tailed bats leave their babies together in communal roosts, and each mother can find her baby by listening for its distinct cry. The participant hears her baby cry out and is instructed to remember how it sounds so she can later find her baby. Then, without the aid of vision, the participant uses her handheld sensor to navigate the space, finds an insect, and returns to her baby.

At each step, the participant triggers a sensor, prompting congratulations and additional factual information explaining her situation and how it corresponds with a real Mexican Free-tailed Bat’s.

Congratulations and instructions are in second-person after the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series of books, e.g., “You are a Mexican Free-tailed Bat!”

At the conclusion of the experience, the participant is presented with a stuffed baby bat and told, “Take good care of her every night.”

Napkin-sketch storyboard

Running with my initial storyboard, I tried to build a working prototype for the sensory components of the experience.

With no prior experience in this area, I borrowed an Arduino Duemilanove and a rangefinder from my friend Ryan Rusnak. Ryan had previously set these up as an “ultrasonic cane.” This device would allow the bearer to convert local objects’ distances to haptic pulses by pointing it around his vicinity.

However, Ryan was having some issues getting the system to work in practice; he invited me to take a shot, offering to let me use the system as part of my prototype if I could get it working.

After much fussing with parts and code, a little electronics engineering expertise from Asim Mittal, and some fleeting moments of success, I learned the real problem: the system was not physically robust enough to return reliable values from the sensitive rangefinder.

With little time remaining, I chose to scrap the Arduino plan and instead try something completely different. I would simulate the experience using a technique known as Wizard of Oz.

Wizard of Oz is a game of make-believe. Human agents masquerade as an intelligent system, performing its tasks without revealing themselves to the user. This allows evaluators to pretend a system is capable of more advanced actions than its current implementation permits.

In this case, the proposed system of sensors is absolutely feasible with modern technology. Wizard of Oz was used purely as a failsafe maneuver under time constraints.

One crew member paced back and forth to simulate a flying insect. Two others clacked percussive instruments to approximate the sounds of Mexican Free-tailed Bat babies. I used a handheld, stylus-operated, electric keyboard known as a Stylophone to provide participants with auditory feedback (rather than haptic) corresponding to distance from obstacles, prey, and the cave.

Joe, our “flying insect”

An instructional audio recording played on a laptop. My lab’s dining area represented the cave, and an adjoining office represented the outdoor environs of the Guadalupe Mountains. The participant was handed a disabled iPhone after being blindfolded, was led to assume that it was enabled with distance detection, and pointed it around for auditory feedback.

I recruited one woman (29) and two children (12 and 16) to interact with the experience. During Wizard of Oz, I encouraged participants to Think Aloud—to describe their actions and feelings as they navigated the experience.

Participants favorably evaluated the experience during Wizard of Oz and retrospective interviews. The experience achieved notable success along the indices of my effectiveness analysis matrix. Participants smiled and laughed throughout the experience despite abbreviated training and spatial limitations, often even misinterpreting related difficulties as intentional role-play elements. Participants said the experience contained a desirable balance of information, instruction, and facts, and that narrative immersion added meaning for them. The Choose Your Own Adventure narrative style was also a hit.

After Think Aloud and retrospective interviews, I compiled participant feedback into Usability Aspect Reports (UAR’s) to evaluate the current iteration of the design and to inform future iterations.

Sample UAR’s

AnimalConnection combines fun and learning in viscerally felt ways, giving visitors the connection they long for while using technology unobtrusively.

Because experience can be a more effective teacher than lecture, animal role-play exhibits can more directly affect visitors’ long-term knowledge of animal facts and concerns about conservation (Davey, 2006).

The contextual research underlying AnimalConnection also better positions it to help increase patronage. (See Works Cited in the below brief: Morgan & Hodgkinson, 1999.)

Even in prototype form, AnimalConnection outperformed its brethren within nearly every metric—and left participants talking. “That was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” said the 16 year-old girl with eyes wide. Meanwhile, the 29 year-old woman exclaimed, “It makes you realize that blind people are like the bat.”

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