Visitors Experiences in Different Zoo Exhibits

Abstract

Zoos help people to learn through exhibiting the relationships of animals in nature. Therefore, they have the important missions of education and protection of wild life. Most of these missions are achieved through visitors' experiences in exhibit areas. Therefore, it is important to understand visitors' experiences in the zoo and know the reasons that affect these experiences. Animals should exhibit normal behaviors actively to enable visitors to have positive experiences during their visits. For this reason, the design of exhibit areas is significant. The purpose of this study is to determine the visitors' perceptual descriptions in the zoos including different exhibit areas and their reasons to visit them. Thus, the role of the zoos in enabling visitors to learn nature protection and have environmental consciousness is explored correlating with zoo typologies. In this study, three zoos in different typologies in Turkey have been examined and it is conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the typologies of the zoos have been identified. In the second stage, a questionnaire has been conducted to find out the visitors' visiting aims, the extent they reached these aims, their level of appreciation and their perceptions on exhibit areas. The questionnaire has been performed with 450 zoo visitors, and there have been 150 visitors from each zoo. According to the results of this study, it has been explored that visitors visit the zoos mostly for "education" without considering the design approach. However, it has been found out that the design of exhibit areas affects visitors' level of appreciation and their zoo descriptions. It has been identified that as the level of appreciation increases, the level of reaching aims increases.