A zoo exhibit serves populations with different needs that are hard to reconcile: There are the animals as inhabitants, their keepers, the curators, the sponsors of the zoo, and the visiting public to be served. The ongoing trend towards natural and naturalistic zoo exhibits makes design and construction even more complex and requires teamwork between several disciplines.

Today, there is no education for zoo design, no vocational training, and not even a manual for this special task. Furthermore, there is no internationally accessible information on zoo planning and on existing animal exhibits. There is no internationally accessible platform on planning philosophies and construction technologies.

This thesis suggests to improve communication of expertise on good zoo design by

1. developing criteria for comparable assessments of animal exhibits that are already built,

2. publishing updated and standardized information on existing animal exhibits, such as 
descriptions of exhibit features, costs, and information on skilled professionals, and

3. creating suitable media to make information on zoo design globally available.

A new medium dedicated to zoo design should assist planners, designers and decision makers of animal exhibits in designing structures suited for their needs. Published standardized assessments of animal exhibits that are already built should give zoo personnel guidelines for comparing and understanding animal exhibit designs, and support in finding specialized firms, suitable building materials, plants and interpretation for their own work. It should enable zoo visitors to better recognize, what is good exhibit design. Ultimately, the publication envisioned should improve awareness on appropriate zoo design, and thus create competition among zoos to accomplish assessments criteria.

In this thesis I am describing the historic and actual background to zoo design, the development of criteria for the assessment of animal exhibits and the pilot project which was created for an analysis. The pilot project is a website called ZooLex with the internet address http://www.zoolex.org. ZooLex was designed with input from zoo professionals to test criteria for assessing animal exhibits and to evaluate the appropriateness of the medium website for disseminating information on zoo design. I am presenting the results of my analysis and discussing future options for improving the communication of expertise on zoo design.