Habitat Earth is a visually rich, hyper-real video planetarium projection which was shown in short sections interspersed with live segments presented by Museum staff. It features information about the connectedness of/within ecosystems and the impacts of human food consumption. Staff wanted to learn about visitor impacts overall, and investigate the dynamic of the recorded and live sections. Were those modes effective individually, did they complement each other? I was selected as the external evaluator in a competitive RFP process.
Initial observations and casual conversations with visitors told us that the presentation was exciting, dynamic and varied. To gain further insight into how to design our evaluation, we began with deep, open-ended interviews. Those findings informed the development of structured interviews. Those two interview studies engaged relatively small samples; findings informed development of a self-completed survey with over 100 respondents. The overarching outcome was that very large percentages of study participants experienced an increased awareness of the issues presented, woven together with an emotional response and self-reported motivation to take action. The nature of this visitor experience, and the significant physical challenges with data collection required close collaboration with staff.
