AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, celebrated the Wildlife Explorers Basecamp exhibit at the San Diego Zoo with its Exhibit Award, and Into the Deep at the Monterey Bay Aquarium with an Innovation Award at the 2023 AZA Conference. Ideum, an experiential designer of interactive exhibits, worked with San Diego Zoo and Monterey Bay Aquarium on these award-winning installations.
Wildlife Explorers Basecamp
Ideum worked with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA), Deneen Powell Atelier, and HGW Architecture to develop the Wildlife Explorers Basecamp. Together, these organisations comprise an amazing multidisciplinary collaboration consisting of designers, curators, engineers, and architects. The project aimed to design a distinctive, thematic children’s zoo area that will educate young guests and their families about invertebrates, amphibians, and reptiles through the smart use of interactive media.
Ideum collaborated with this team from the beginning of the project’s conceptualisation in 2018 until its completion. In the end, the firm created more than 20 exhibits for the invertebrate and herpetology buildings.
In addition to designing and installing the AV systems, Ideum also took care of the software development, and the firm’s fabrication team designed and constructed the touch tables at the volunteer and microscope stations. Ideum worked closely with the zoo’s curators in the process of designing and animating realistic scenes and insect characters for the immersive dome experience and collaborated with The Elumenati for the dome’s projection technology.
Into the Deep
Meanwhile, for Into the Deep at Monterey Bay Aquarium, Ideum designed and built a series of fabricated touchscreen towers that frame the Aquarium’s enormous windows, uniting the interior with the view of Monterey Bay.
These towers, which are constructed with 86″ stretch monitors and a small 33″ square monitor on top of each, display images from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s (MBARI) Instagram feed from floor to ceiling. The interactive applications for Into the Deep were developed by Monterey Bay Aquarium, including for these specially designed towers that let guests touch each image to learn more about the topic and the research being done by MBARI.
Ideum would like to congratulate both Monterey Bay Aquarium and San Diego Zoo for their awards success.
