Chapter 11: Part 3 Children'S Drawings: New Tools For Zoo Exhibit Evaluation

Abstract

Abstract How can we test if the subjective goals of exhibit designers are realized in the completed exhibits? Preliminary analysis of children's drawings of completed exhibits at Woodland Park Zoological Gardens show they have promise as diagnostic tools. “An animal cannot be isolated, even conceptually, from the particular environment to which it has become adapted during eons of geologic time without a serious misunderstanding of its true nature.” (Akeley, 1936) “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. At present, we see their whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlin...