Bristol Zoo Project

The first project I was set at my time at university was to present an idea for a brand new interactive experience at Bristol Zoo. We were put into small groups and my group initially brainstormed various ideas which seemed relevant. One of the ideas was to have some sort of virtual African safari experience however we collectively agreed on the idea of constructing an area which physically replicated the habitats of some of the animals at the zoo for example an Arctic area for penguins and an ocean environment for marine animals.

We wanted this attraction to be as immersive as possible, so each area would have sound effects as well as physical props which replicate natural environments.

To make this attraction appeal to a wide audience we decided to implement a quiz into the maze which made the maze more fun as well as educate youngsters.

To make the customer's experience more interactive we agreed on designing a mobile app which serves as a companion app to the maze by supplying clues to the quiz but also gives background information on the history of the zoo.

Here's an image of the home page of our Brisol Zoo app

I designed the app so that it was as user friendly as possible and the ways in which I went about to achieve this was to display as little on the pages as possible. This is a technique I had learnt in one of the Concept & Idealization seminars. The lecturer explained how messages can be conveyed much clearer in a sort of "design vacuum" where the audience's focus is directed on a single part of the design.

However on some pages such as the Aquarium & Gorilla page is implemented some dynamic effects to the backgrounds. The reason I did this is because I didn't want the page to just include a load of text and a background image as this would make the page quite unattractive and would likely immediately lose the interest of a younger audience. I thought the dynamic effects would make the page more interesting which as a result improved the likelihood of the text being absorbed and read by the audience.

I overall think the presentation went well as every member of the group was able to convey our collective ideas clearly. We explained where our inspiration and research came from and how it influenced our design.