Google Cloud x PIF

Tomorrow Cities Experience

How to design an experience that turns urban developers in Saudi Arabia into advocates by letting them build their own smart city of the future.

THE BRIEF

As part of Vision 2030, Google Cloud and the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) developed a suite of ‘Smart City’ technologies designed to improve urban life in Saudi Arabia. But urban developers weren’t convinced.

To turn these skeptics into advocates, we needed to create an installation that showed developers how ‘Smart City’ technologies could increase liveability, sustainability and economic growth in their projects.

THE SOLUTION

At an in-person workshop with Google and PIF, we defined how ‘Smart City’ technologies could benefit Saudi residents and aligned on the type of installation we wanted: a gamified, educational and tech-driven experience.

Our concept was the Tomorrow Cities Experience: a hands-on, multi-zone installation at PIF Headquarters in Riyadh that empowered visitors to build and optimise their own virtual city with ‘Smart Cities’ technologies.

THE APPROACH

The narrative of the experience unfolded across five chapters to build understanding of Smart City use cases in the context of Vision 2030: Introduction, Inspiration, Imagination, Education and Connection.

Activated with RFID cards, developers could move through the space at their own pace to go deeper into the use cases that most resonated with them.

The five chapters were each anchored to a specific location, which has a specific purpose:

Welcome Point: Registration and onboarding
Inspiration Studio: Introducing the Smart Cities concept
Creators’ Lab: Enabling guests to design their city
Impact Hub: Showing the impact of use cases on cities
Connection Zone: Motivating guests to implement

INTERACTIVE USE CASES

We also built a clickable prototype to bring the concept to life for stakeholders. As part of this prototype, we created screen content that showed the experience in full, highlighting specific use cases such as Smart Mobility below.

Tomorrow Cities Experience: full walkthrough

THE RESULTS

The project successfully repositioned smart cities as a human-first solution and secured investment from PIF Executive team. By inviting developers to play an active role in shaping the future, we helped Google Cloud and PIF take a major step forward in turning a bold vision into reality. The experience was designed to run for 3+ months, with a full development timeline of 6 months.

Credits

WE BUILT THIS CITY

Monks
Amsterdam, NL
2024

AGENCY

Creative Director

ROLE

Dirk van Ginkel
Amanda Bao
Diana Andrasi
Daniel Goodwin
Victorine Snijders
Nnamdi Nwosu

David Fasullo
Alireza Sedah
Victoire Douy
Jana Heiss
Antoine Tannous
Ben Wager

BACK TO THE WORK •