

Your exhibit may be part of a themed part of the zoo such as the Asian Trail, which will require you to choose animals from a specific region of the world. The zoo may want you to educate people about local animals. A quarter of the animals at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park are endangered, so you may have a constraint of having to pick endangered species. Most zoos these days also have scientific constraints. You may have environmental constraints such as having to use recycled materials or wood from sustainable forests for your exhibit.Ĭhina charges zoos an annual fee of $1 million for every panda at the zoo. You would definitely be constrained by cost, not just of buying the animals but also of transporting and maintaining them. Your exhibit space might be outside, so you could be constrained by the local weather. The biggest one is likely to be the size of your exhibit space. Now that you have decided on the criteria for success you will need to consider what limits you have: the constraints. Or are there behaviors that that you don’t want to see the animals displaying? You will definitely want to make sure the animals in your exhibit are healthy and happy, but how will you measure this? Are there certain behaviors that tell you that animals are happy? Happy animals tend to breed (if there are two of them!), so perhaps this could be a requirement. How will you measure this? Mark Van Bergh, Smithsonian’s National Zoo

You will want your exhibit to give visitors a positive impression of the zoo. Will it be the number of visitors that stop at your exhibit or how long they stop? Do you want criteria that show visitors have learned something? Do you want to know if you motivated people to do something about conservation? Do you want a way of measuring how satisfied visitors are with their experience? No one wants to see an empty exhibit space at a zoo, so you may want to decide on a percentage of time that animals are visible as a measure of visitor satisfaction. You need to decide how you are going to measure the success of your zoo exhibit design: the criteria. Step 1: Understand the criteria and constraints Requirements are made up of criteria and constraints. As with any engineering problem, the first thing you need to know are the requirements. I know, this is a stretch but "bear" with me! Let’s break it down into the steps you might take if this were an engineering project. Her loyal fans celebrated each milestone, from when she took her first steps to when she moved to bigger pools.Imagine you are asked to design a zoo exhibit for your local zoo. She kept gaining weight and building strength, as her social media following continued to grow. She received 24-hour attention from zoo staff and her health even became a citywide effort when workers from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical center helped put an IV in Fiona when she experienced dehydration.ĭespite all the odds, Fiona proved the zoo staff wrong.

Zookeepers were expecting her to arrive in March, so when she came into the world in January, they weren't sure she would make it. While that might sound like a lot, most baby hippos weigh between 55 and 120 pounds at birth. At the time, she was six weeks premature and weighed only 29 pounds. The baby hippopotamus was born at the Cincinnati Zoo earlier this year. 24, now weighs at least 375 pounds.įiona the hippo was catapulted into social media stardom from the day she arrived on the planet. Fiona, a hippo calf born six weeks premature, on Jan.
