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You also will have to consider how easy it is to obtain the animals, whether their food is easily accessible, and whether the animals will be suited to the physical characteristics of the space. An animal that prefers to spend all day sleeping in a burrow is unlikely to be popular with visitors! The animals for your exhibit have to be comfortable being on public view. Whether an animal is diurnal (awake in the day) or nocturnal (awake at night) is a big consideration. Mehgan Murphy, Smithsonian’s National Zoo

Mandara is a western lowland gorilla who lives at the Smithsonian Zoological Park. Large animals are more popular than small animals, although of course not all exhibit spaces will be big enough for an elephant! Attractive animals win over ”ugly” ones, but can you afford a panda? People like to see intelligent animals that are human-like in their behavior, so monkeys and apes are always popular. Research has shown that people have certain preferences when it comes to seeing animals in a zoo. Now you have to choose animals for your exhibit that meet the criteria within the constraints. 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. Imagine you are asked to design a zoo exhibit for your local zoo.