Bringing structure & storytelling to a wildlife non-profit in Tobago

Corbin Local Wildlife

Animal Reserve

Industry

Over 9 weeks we redesigned a fragmented visitor experience, strengthened public engagement and built sustainable systems across digital and physical touchpoints. Lots of listening, plenty of problem-solving and a little bit of wood-cutting.

Corbin Local Wildlife is a small but mighty nature reserve on the Caribbean island of Tobago, focused on the rescue, rehabilitation and education of native wildlife.

With limited resources, the team runs guided tours, cares for animals and raises awareness about poaching and the exotic pet trade. After speaking at Bounce in January 2025, we connected with Ian Wright, the inspirational co-founder of Corbin Local Wildlife. A few chats later, we knew that we could co-design something great together.

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Partner: Fundación Montecito
Woodworker: José Luis

Ash and Felipe looking at nature reserve in Colombia

The Challenge

The reserve’s service ecosystem had grown organically but patchily!

Visitors often arrived misinformed, left unclear about the reserve’s mission or didn’t realise they could support further. Touchpoints like the website, social media, welcome area and on-site signage were disjointed, outdated or inaccessible.

After several conversations with the co-founders Ian and Roy, we framed our challenge: to map, redesign and reconnect these fragmented touchpoints into a coherent, engaging and sustainable experience — one that worked for tourists, locals and the overstretched staff running the show.

Felipe doing research in classroom in Colombia

The Approach

Ash and I began by immersing ourselves not just in the reserve, but in the rhythms of daily life in Tobago — its wildlife, people, culture and community. We shadowed staff through feeding routines, joined public tours, chatted with taxi drivers, met local conservationists and “limed” with neighbours. This wide-angle lens helped us understand the ecosystem Corbin Local Wildlife operates within and the mix of perceptions, expectations and constraints shaping its impact.
We mapped the end-to-end visitor experience and audited every touchpoint: print materials, signage, website, social media, WhatsApp, booking flows, payment and donation processes.
From this, we defined core opportunity areas and began designing low-maintenance, high-impact interventions. These ranged from restructuring website content and improving on-site signage to launching a public-facing campaign encouraging safe wildlife rescues. We used behavioural models like COM-B to shape messages that could shift public action without requiring new infrastructure.
Prototyping was key. Content was tested with staff, signage was trial-printed and refined and installations were built with available tools and materials. Everything was designed to be maintainable and deliverable by the Corbin team—grounded in real-world constraints and workflows.
Every piece of work was prototyped, tested, printed and installed on the ground, ensuring our ideas didn’t stay in Figma, but landed where they could make a real difference.

Data Collection

Corbin Forest School. Data collection bah blah blah

After several conversations with the co-founders Ian and Roy, we framed our challenge: to map, redesign and reconnect these fragmented touchpoints into a coherent, engaging and sustainable experience — one that worked for tourists, locals and the overstretched staff running the show.

Wall

We created templates for easy development of future card packs.