Creating Interpretive Tour Resources for Lyon Arboretum
Partner organization: Lyon Arboretum
Team members: Michael Bragg (Mechanical Engineering ’24), Maria Cox (Electrical and Computer Engineering ’24), Madelyn Marcotte (Data Science ’24), Christina Tran (Architectural Engineering ’24)
Download the team’s final presentation.
Places such as arboreta and botanical gardens attract many visitors who are looking to study plants or simply spend time in nature. Arboreta can be great places for people to learn about ecology, conservation, and local culture and history (Ballantyne et al., 2008). Many arboreta employ informal learning to educate their visitors. Studies have found that at organizations like arboreta, informal learning is often more effective than formal learning because it allows visitors to learn by exploring exhibits themselves (Tal and Morag, 2007: Rickinson et al., 2004).
The Harold L. Lyon Arboretum, located in Mānoa Valley, Honolulu, was seeking to create educational material in order to help fulfill their mission of educating their guests about conservation and culture. We interviewed the Arboretum’s Education Manager, Raedelle Van Fossen, to determine expectations of our deliverable and to understand the constraints they are facing, such as poor internet access, tropical weather conditions, and limited budget. From this interview, we identified the best option for the Arboretum would be a downloadable, educational brochure. To combat the lack of internet and budget, we decided on a PDF format so all of the brochure’s contents can be easily downloaded, and it can be used reliably without internet connection.
Our team conducted an on-site analysis at the Arboretum to learn about their current educational offerings for general visitors, as well as learn about the most notable attractions and gardens. This allowed us to identify effective features of the Arboretum’s materials along with any plants or topics of interest that were not highlighted. This on-site analysis provided a foundation to begin determining the contents of the brochure.
We interviewed staff from the Education Department, Grounds and Collections Department, and Main Office in order to determine the contents of our brochure. We conducted semi-structured interviews to learn what the staff wants visitors to take away from their experiences at Lyon, and their personal preferences on brochure content. We also asked the staff about their interactions with guests to gain insight on visitor habits. Some valuable information from the interviews included the most frequently visited gardens and how locals interact with the Arboretum differently than tourists.
We surveyed visitors after they finished their hikes to further help determine the contents of the brochure. We asked about their knowledge of plants and culture, quality of learning experience during their visit, and anything they would like to see included in the brochure. The respondents included both first time and returning visitors, people of various ages, and people with varying levels of botanical and cultural knowledge. After conducting these surveys, we analyzed our data to determine what visitors are most interested in. We received suggestions such as implementing a bird guide or garden history sections. We also gained insight on what parts of the Arboretum’s current educational material were beneficial so we could feature this in our brochure.
In addition to the Arboretum’s materials, our group conducted research on digital, educational material and brochures at other organizations. We visited the Waikiki Aquarium and the Bishop Museum, and evaluated the educational material that they provided. We also evaluated digital brochures from four other organizations that were available on their websites. We analyzed both digital and physical materials from our perspectives as visitors and determined positive and negative qualities of their brochures and digital resources. We used those qualities to help guide us in the designing of our brochure and to get a broader scope of what makes interpretive material effective. We analyzed the format and layout of these organizations’ materials and identified aspects of effective, informal learning such as clarity of information, low text to image ratio, and the use of themes.
Sample pages from the final garden guide
In order to create and design the layout of the digital PDF brochure, we used Adobe InDesign, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Illustrator. The brochure was curated with interactivity in mind and features links for seamless navigation through sections of the brochure. The navigation is done through the use of a table of contents where each subsection can be clicked, redirecting the user to that portion of the brochure. Each section corresponds to an important topic or a garden with a list of plants that can be found there. Each page is also equipped with “Back” and “Home” buttons, leading to each garden’s plant menu and the main Table of Contents respectively.
The brochure covers safety information, the history of Lyon Arboretum, prominent gardens with key plant information, as well as various attractions and wildlife. Most of the content was provided to us by the Arboretum, but we also conducted additional research on some of the plants. Our team spent a significant amount of time visiting the gardens to learn about the collections and take photos for the brochure. Each garden has a short description with a list of prominent plants in that collection. Each plant has a photo and information on origin, scientific name, and family along with a description.
To evaluate our deliverable, we received feedback from staff members across multiple departments and applied the necessary changes to the brochure. We conducted a beta test by having 25 visitors use our brochure while walking through the gardens and completing a survey at the end of their visit. The survey included questions on how the brochure impacted their experience, information they enjoyed, and additional features they would like to see in the brochure. We used these results to further edit and improve our brochure, and shared the editable files with the Education Department so they can update it in the future.