Animal Experience Design for a Zoo(1/2)
Pt I: The Context
Once upon a time I was a young child in a pretty big animal farm, sharing my days with cows, pigs, rabbits, chickens and many other animals. As any other tender child in this world, I felt they were my friends and I talked to them like they could even understand italian language and our typical gestures.
I had the strong feeling that I wouldn’t have liked to be one of those cows I liked so much: same meal everyday, an enclosure to limit my space and no green grass but excrements of mine and my fellows’. No, thank you.
So, in my bed at night, staring at the ceiling, I planned many times to help them to escape, maybe involving also all the other animals but the chickens, ’cause chickens seemed to have such a great time around my grandmother’s house.
I still remember when I told my father if you truly love me you will free all the cows tonight. But I must admit my father won me when he answered If you find them a safe place to stay, I will free them and take them there.
I had no idea if there was a land for happy free cows, and even if I was a baby, I understood that animals are generally unsafe in this humans’ planet.
Two decades later and three hundred fifty miles away, in the sunny and eclectic Barcelona, I went back to those memories as I took part in a project to improve or transform the city’s zoo.
Barcelona’s Zoo was inaugurated in 1892 in Parc de la Ciutadella, where it’s still situated. It passed through many phases and changes, had some iconic animal’s like the elephant Julia or the only known albino gorilla in the world, Little Snowflake (Copito de Nieve in spanish and Floquet de Neu in catalan), but it’s now passing through pretty difficult times.
In Spain, one hundred and forty zoos closed only in the las month. Many protests occur every year in Barcelona in front of the zoo or in the city center, ruled mostly by animalists. ZOOXXI was founded in Barcelona and fights for a transformation of the Zoos of the world, being nowadays one of the most interesting proposals against the classic model of zoo.
Barcelona’s Zoo is losing costumers each year, lacking alternative ideas. Here’s where me and my team decided to work and to make a research to discover the main problems of this old zoo, seeing what could ever be the best answer to such a discussed ethic problem.
For doing this, we used the Design Thinking method, that I could simplify in five steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing. This is what we did and I am going to tell you how.
Pt II: The Research
Having a blank page in front of you is always complicated. We were a group of four and we didn’t know absolutely how to start when we did the first kick off reunion. Our main goals were sentenced as understanding why people go to Zoo and understanding how Barcelona’s Zoo could become a reference for zoos worldwide. We also decided to focus on the animals’ situation and care, a better user experience inside the zoo and economic and environmental improvement.
So we made the so called Research Questions to find out the first focuses of our research, writing a lot of ideas in post-its and putting them in order. This was our result:
We voted some points we considered more interesting and important and we moved on with a Benchmark, studying a little about other zoos in the world (we chose some of the most famous zoos). The Benchmark showed zoos, in general, are not using digital helps or virtual reality to improve their possibilities, and they have problems to find alternatives to a standard model that seem to keep receiving critics from many parts of the society.
We also made a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, in spanish “DAFO”) to analyze the main characteristics of Barcelona’s zoo. We also made Netnology (looking for users’ feedback in the web) and Desk Reasearch to discover as much as we could online. We noticed that families with children are the most common users of the zoo.
Finally, we entered together in the zoo, took photos of the animals, of the spaces, made a sort of safari technique research to see the place like a costumer would see it, made interviews to families, children, zoo workers and animalists outside, and finally we did an online questionnaire with answers from more than two hundred people about Barcelona’s Zoo.
In general, people we interviewed in the zoo had a general positive idea of the zoo, but they were pretty worried about animals’ mental and physical health. Many people said they go to zoo only for the entertainment of their children. On the other hand, the interview to the animalist showed they are in general completely agains zoos and many of them don’t even think anything similar to a zoo should ever exist, as they don’t even find in it something educative.
The online questionnaire showed that 64,1% of people think zoo should change radically to something more respectful with the animal’s state. Only 14,7% seem to defend nowadays’ zoos. Also, 68,6% of people would like to live virtual experiences in a zoo, while 8,1% wouldn’t and 23,3% don’t know. Virtual experience seems also to be the favourite alternative animalists found when they imagine how to keep people entertained, respecting animal needs.
We then created two Personas:one of a mother and one of a tourist who doesn’t really like the idea of animals in cages.
We made their Empathy Maps, to figure out what their context is and what they think and say, and finally we tracked their Journey Maps. We detected a lot of paint points in the time they spent in the zoo.
Keeping this in mind, we made the “How Might We” questions to see how could we find a solution to pain points we detected. That took us to the formulation of some Insights, hints of users’ behaviour, problems and needs. We decided to produce eight insights so we could have more material to ideate on them.
Pt III: The Animal Experience
During the research I got very interested in the idea of developing not only the UX but also the AX, meaning with it the Animal Experience. This idea occurred to me because, as a group of UX Designers, working on empathy, we couldn’t ever leave behind, in my opinion, any kind of possible need and any pain point. And, as we know, animals also have an inner world that could get better, if they live in a zoo, as we make the best to make them feel comfortable with their needs and their own nature.
Back to my personal experience in a farm, I learned that things are better when animals feel better. Cows produce better milk, dogs don’t scream that loud all night, chicken share quietly their spaces and also pig’s meat taste better when he lived happily and died quietly. There is something sacred and fundamental in the respect between humans and animals that is, at the same time, educative and evergreen. Here lays one of the reasons why Barcelona’s Zoo look so old: people are worried about the animals `cause there’s no work on Animal Experience and no deep research and information about their needs, their feelings and the way the zoo is supposed to change due to its animals’ needs.
But what do I exactly mean with Animal Experience? Actually it means two things in one: on one hand, Animal Experience would be the way we could apply the UX to animals behaviour to find out with the research techniques insights that could tell us animals needs and problems. So we could design a zoo starting from the animals, which are, in my opinion, the epicentre of the zoo.
On the other hand, Animal Experience could also be the way users approach to the zoo, experimenting the point of view of animals as an educative part of their zoo experience.
In 2016 a study was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication titled Experiencing nature: Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature. Basically it shows that a test on users demonstrated that embodying animals in immersive virtual reality increased the conscience of users about animals’ and nature’s needs.
When detecting insights, I tried to make the insight of a monkey. It was at the same time an experiment and a necessary part of our research. It went like this: In his day by day, a monkey want to eat and play with his community, because he likes to socialize and spend time with other monkeys, but he doesn’t want his life to be reduced to such a small space.
We could discuss that a monkey doesn’t want this or that and he doesn’t have an opinion about zoos, but of course we can imagine that if we apply the same approach we use for making Personas, Empathy Maps and Journey Maps to animal, we can point out what we observe in animals. Monkeys in Barcelona’s Zoo are living in very small places and anyone could see they don’t have many alternatives of movement and discover.
Animal Experience could be the missing link that could connect forever zoos to animalists’ and parents’ worries about animals’ feelings and safety.
Pt IV: Ideating
This was the best moment of our work. As we finished researching, we started to group our best impressions, results and insights to generate ideas that could be an answer to our doubts. We used a lot of techniques, we made Brainstorming to generate the biggest number of ideas, and we ended up with a wall full of post-its, again. Our ideas moved from immersive reality, inverted zoo (people walking through glass corridors, seeing animals living in wide green spaces), realistic textures to discover the feeling of touch without obligating animals to be touch everyday by a lot of people, and in general we thought there was no need of real exotic animals in Barcelona’s zoo, as we could improve virtual reality to substitute them.
We also imagined what would we do if we were Apple, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Spotify, or if we had to work with drones, robots and other technologies. Everything was meant to help us think out of the box.
So, when the ideating day was over, we voted for the last time, knowing that we were going to prototype the best ideas. But first, we ordered our ideas between possible/impossible and innovative/conventional, to filter the best ideas (in this case, the possible and innovative ones).
We ended up with a bunch of things that we wanted to defend, there where many interesting ideas so we decided to prototype a new web for the zoo showing some of these ideas that could make Barcelona’s Zoo a more ethic and contemporary place.
