The Night Safari is a separate entity and is required to earn its keep. However, its mission is still that of the Singapore Zoological Gardens, which is ultimately conservation. We believe that the Night Safari complements the Zoo’s activities in conservation education. By providing a relatively up-market, unique, themed experience, it reaches an otherwise non zoo-visiting audience and delivers its message in a painless, even pleasurable way. We also believe the Night Safari demonstrates how innovation and attention to visitor-needs help zoos compete with the multiplicity of choices for leisure activities today.

Two further gains accrue from this development: first, the Night Safari is a step towards the Zoo’s goal of cutting the apron strings of subsidies from government by generating sufficient revenue surpluses for both operations and development. Second, when viewed as a major increase in exhibit space, the Night Safari has enabled us to breed more endangered species than the resources (space, staff, etc.) of the zoo alone allowed.

Sustained success also requires that the same degree of innovative thinking that inspired the facility must be carried through into operations. Periodic external moderation by a panel of independent consultants helps to keep faith with the original idea and stimulate on-going renewal. This renewal process has to be coupled with a systematic and co-ordinated approach to maintenance and upgrading between times, and this in turn has to involve the whole zoo organisation to ensure meaningful results.

The Night Safari lighting design process is wholly in keeping with, and an extension of, habitat simulation and landscape immersion. This approach, embraced by many zoos today, attempts to be, in contrast to Hagenbeck, as true to real habitats as possible (if only to human senses). At the same time, however, we set out to create an atmospheric impression of forests at night, recalling Hagenbeck’s romantic tableaux (a little bit ‘Poussin’ perhaps).

The Night Safari model demonstrates that creative or artistic lighting design is better than design by engineering standards. This is incidentally in contrast to what was asserted at an earlier Paignton conference (Cansdale). More generally, no aspect of exhibit design should resort to stock solutions without creative thought.

While the Night Safari may not work everywhere (due to variable diurnal light cycles and climate), the thinking that led to it should be a process every zoo should periodically undergo. The lighting, as its most significant physical innovation, arose out of considering the problems of traditional nocturnal houses versus the real thing and asking, “why not dispense with the house?” The more the idea was thought about, the more it was realised that it could work in our situation. The exercise of such thinking feeds back into the organisation and it becomes habitual to question and consider alternatives. Occasionally, it is worth reinventing the wheel.