Seven Feeders for a Langur (An Innovation Sprint at the San Diego Zoo)

In spring 2022, during my junior year, I joined a standalone innovation sprint program that partnered student teams with the San Diego Zoo. We got free zoo access for the entire quarter — which was, honestly, reason enough. This is the project I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did.

Seven Feeders for a Langur (An Innovation Sprint at the San Diego Zoo)

I am, by training, a business and design student. I think in systems and aesthetics, in stakeholder value and visual hierarchy. So when I found myself trying to engineer an arboreal feeding mechanism for a group of Langurs, I was surprised to discover that the problem felt completely natural to me — which is either a good sign about how I think, or a worrying one about how much I had been underutilizing that part of my brain.

The brief was deceptively simple: design an improved arboreal feeder for a species at the San Diego Zoo that would reduce the burden on Care Specialists. My team — three of us — had the freedom to choose the species and enclosure, which meant the first real decision was also the most consequential one. We considered bears (too many species, too many dietary variables), a bird enclosure (interesting, but the constraints were unwieldy), and a few others before landing on the Langurs. They were the right choice. Langurs are primates with strong arboreal instincts — they spend most of their time at the top of their enclosure, clustered high, which meant any feeder that required staff to manually reach elevated heights multiple times a day was already fighting their nature. The existing system, a single pulley setup, was functional but limited: height constraints, insufficient enrichment, no real capacity for the langurs to work for their food in any meaningful way.

That last point — enrichment — turned out to be as important as the feeding mechanics themselves. Zoo animals don't just need calories; they need cognitive engagement, the satisfaction of problem-solving, some facsimile of the foraging behavior their bodies were built for. A feeder that simply delivered food was only solving half the problem.

So we started designing. And then we designed again. And again.

The first few concepts were exploratory — a pulley maze box inspired by ape feeders already in use elsewhere, a moving clothesline system that would traverse the roof of the enclosure, a drape system borrowed from chandelier mechanics that allowed multiple food baskets at varying heights. We tried a claw machine concept (elegant in theory, immediately complicated by the prospect of langur fingers near moving parts and the need for an electrical outlet in an outdoor enclosure). We tried a harness system — a retractable rope with a food bowl that Care Specialists could lower for refilling without disturbing the animals at height. Each idea taught us something. Each one had a flaw that the next version tried to solve.

Midway through the sprint, the zoo came back to us with updated requirements. The parameters shifted. In a real product development context, this is not an anomaly — it is simply Tuesday. We took it in stride, used the reset to pressure-test our assumptions, and came back with sharper thinking.

The final two concepts reflected everything we had learned. The first was an evolved harness system: a solar-powered box fitted with a retractable rope mechanism, free-moving along a rope at multiple heights, inaccessible to the langurs except as an enrichment object, and customizable for different food types. The second was a gear-based tree system — a mechanism hidden within a fabricated tree structure that could rotate food boxes through multiple positions, like a slow ferris wheel, shifting throughout the day with minimal staff intervention. Both designs prioritized the same things: reduced manual labor, natural integration into the enclosure environment, and genuine enrichment value for the animals.

We presented the deck to the zoo and handed over our designs as a foundation for future development. Whether any of it became anything, I genuinely don't know. But I learned something I hadn't expected to: that strategic thinking and engineering thinking are not as far apart as their respective departments would have you believe. The best design decisions we made were the ones that held both simultaneously — the animal's behavioral needs and the staff's operational reality, the elegance of the mechanism and the pragmatics of cleaning and maintenance.

Also, we got to go to the zoo for free all quarter. That part was simply excellent.