The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) will plan, implement, and evaluate educational programming for its upcoming garden-wide exhibition, "Frida Kahlo's Garden." The programming and interpretation will create an immersive, compelling, interdisciplinary learning experience that merges arts, humanities, and science themes. Programming will celebrate Mexican culture, immersing visitors in the music, dance, food, and fashion that influenced Kahlo and continues to inspire people today. Through the exhibit and programming, visitors will gain insight into the impact of Kahlo's interest in the natural world on her artwork; understand the continuing impact of Mexican nature, nationalism, and intellectual history on arts and culture; and make personal connections between art, nature, and their own lives. The project will also provide a model for other botanical gardens to use to create interdisciplinary exhibitions.
This resource showcases a conference poster that the Wildlife Conservation Society presented at the 2014 Visitor Studies Association Conference and the 2014 Inclusive Museum Conference, outlining the work we undertook to explore the development of a proposed new family exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, "Safari Adventure," paired with selected results and takeaways. In 2011, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded WCS a grant to support our investigation and development. We asked ourselves the questions: How can zoo exhibits better connect people to nature? By what methods can we explore
This analysis of visitors’ experience of the "Congo Gorilla Forest" exhibition at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo was commissioned to investigate how this 15 year old exhibition is perceived by visitors, and if things have changed since an original summative evaluation in 1999-2000. Questions of particular interest were: 1. Have the characteristics of visitors seeing this exhibition changed? Has awareness or interest in environmental concepts changed? 2. Is the exhibition still appealing to visitors? 3. Are exhibit components such as the film and Conservation Choices Computers
The Bronx Zoo of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) engaged Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. to conduct formative evaluation and community focus groups related to a proposed exhibit, "Safari Adventure." The aim with this exhibit is to provide better connections to nature for families in our community and foster a life-long sense of environmental stewardship. The exhibit concept was born of the issue that, today, there exists a greater need to connect people to nature than ever before, a topic especially relevant for our community—part of the largest urban population in the United States
In 2011, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) a Museums for America – Engaging Communities grant to explore the development of a new family exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, "Safari Adventure." Our aim with this exhibit is to provide better connections to nature for families in our community and foster a life-long sense of environmental stewardship. The exhibit concept was born of the issue that, today, there exists a greater need to connect people to nature than ever before, a topic especially relevant for our community—part of the largest urban population in the United States. The IMLS grant allowed us to take a multi-faceted approach to inform our current thoughts about useful nature exhibit practices and what resonates with our audiences. Through evaluation, prototyping, visits to other institutions, workshops, and community focus groups, we explored themes of child nature play, intergenerational learning, community engagement, and barriers to access. We are disseminating the various reports and products from this process to publicize our findings to the larger professional community. The Wildlife Conservation Society, founded in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society, saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature. We are the world’s most comprehensive conservation organization, currently managing about 500 conservation projects in more than 60 countries and educating millions of visitors each year at our five living institutions in New York City: the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo and Queens Zoo. Our conservation programs work directly with animals such as gorillas, elephants, condors, and penguins, and we manage more than 200 million acres of protected lands around the world.
The objective of this project is to extend the concept of crowdsourcing in citizen science to the interaction design of the organization as well as to data collection. Distributed technologies offer new opportunities for conducting scientific research on a larger scale than ever before by enabling distributed collaboration. Virtual organizations that use distributed technologies in scientific organizations have primarily focused on how dedicated, professional scientists collaborate and communicate. More recently a rapidly increasing number of citizen science virtual organizations are being formed. Citizen scientists participate in scientific endeavors and typically lack formal credentials, do not hold professional positions in scientific institutions, and bring diversity of knowledge and expertise to projects and challenges. They participate in scientific endeavors related to their personal scientific interests and create new challenges for the design of virtual organizations. In terms of intellectual merit, the project will make three specific contributions: a new interaction design for collecting biodiversity data within a nature park, a model for crowdsourcing the design of an social computing approach to citizen science, and an analysis of the impact of crowdsourcing the design on motivating participation in collecting biodiversity data. Interactive tabletop computers will be placed in two nature parks so that the design of the citizen science environment can be embedded in a park experience and engage the public in understanding more about their parks, in data collection, and develop a personal commitment to environmental sustainability issues. In terms of broader impacts, the project provides three types of impact: research training by including graduate students, broad public dissemination to enhance scientific understanding of biodiversity, and benefits to society through association with the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) and Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Mary Lou MaherTom YehJennifer Preece