Meet Diane Ledder:
Curator and Zoologist for the
San Diego Wild Animal Park
Exhibit Design

Sara: Who designs the places in the park or zoo where the animals live?

Diane: That's one of the things I help do. It's one of the creative sides to my job. I help come up with ideas for new exhibits. That's called exhibit design. We'll walk down to the Nairobi Village area in a little while, and I'll show you our newest exhibit, the Mombasa Lagoon, that's just opened.

Sara: What are those little signs for near an exhibit?

Diane: Those small panels we call "home panels", and they'll say just a little bit about an animal and where it lives. Or what it does. Or something about its habits. It's quick information that the parent can deliver to a child, or children can read to their parents. It can stimulate conversation about the animals. A lot of times, kids know more about the animals than parents do. And about endangered species and recycling. So it's a chance for families to talk a little bit and for kids to teach parents what they know and vice versa.

Sara: What does a design team do?

Diane: When we have a project that we're going to build here at the Wild Animal Park or the Zoo, we put together what's called a design team. That means that people with various areas of expertise get together. We'll have some curators, some keepers, some people from the construction department and the horticulture department, and these people will meet on a weekly basis. They plan the exhibit.

Sara: What is the design process like?

Diane: Our first step [in renovating the Mombasa Lagoon] was to make this area more kid-friendly and family oriented. We wanted families to be able to explore and learn and do things together. We wanted our exhibits to be more interactive, with things for people to do, places for children to play and to climb and to explore.

So we did some research, talking to people already doing something like what we'd like to do in our exhibit. Here's the team approach again. We took some curators and educators and people from operations who coordinate how things run around here and went [back East] to several zoos and children's museums.

We looked at elements that worked or seemed successful and interviewed their staffs to ask worked and what didn't work. What did people like? What didn't they like? We hit on a few ideas that we thought we'd incorporate into the village here. Now we're carrying out the design plan. Once it's in place, we'll evaluate it and see how effective it is.

Sara: What kinds of things do you think about when you design an animal exhibit?

Diane: When planning an exhibit, you think about the well-being of the animal. The exhibit has to satisfy its physical needs and its psychological needs. It needs to feel safe in the exhibit and comfortable.

The second consideration is, the exhibit needs to be safe for the keeper and reasonably easy to care for. Keepers have to go in each day and clean and feed and redo any planting, so it has to be safe and practical for them.

The last thing we think about is the fact that the exhibit should be aesthetically appealing [great to look at] for the public, and educational.

It could be a great exhibit for the animal, all overgrown with lots of places to hide, and be a very poor exhibit for the public because they couldn't see the animal.

You have to balance these things and try to keep all three in mind as you're designing an exhibit. It's not easy. It's kind of complicated, but it's fun.

Sara: Of all the animals of the park here that you've gotten to plan the exhibit for, is there one that you're particularly happy with or proud of?

Diane: That's tough. We did an Australian walk-through exhibit which was really fun because it was new. Rather than put an animal in an enclosure and the people look in from the outside, the idea was that people would go in with the kangaroos and wallabys. That's pretty common in facilities in Australia right now, but it's not done very often here in the US. I acquired the animals for that. Then I worked with some of the people to get them acclimated because the animals weren't used to having people walk with them. Then watching some of our first guests walk through the exhibit and feed the kangaroos and come nose to nose with an emu -- that was fun.

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