HOW CAN WE DESIGN AN ENVIRONMENT TO STIMULATE INNOVATION?

For a paid client design sprint, CallisonRTKL was tasked with outlying the strategy, narrative, and design for the central hub of a digitally enabled “city of the future.”

The final output of the project featured a series of plans, renders and animations along with a narrative video and website.

During this project, I worked on research, creative direction, and strategy. As well copywriting and design for presentation decks, including the creation of custom graphics and animations.

The primary methodology behind these speculative spaces (in-use by a current development based in Saudi Arabia) was that they should be permeable, adaptable, and playful. By design, the city would inspire, teach, and be used as a tool for further research and development.

This process was heavily inspired by natural and indigenous design, ongoing sustainability research, current and past visions of a ‘smart city’, as well as principles associated with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics), collective learning, and environments as play.

A DECENTRALIZED CITY

All parts stand on their own, but use technological infrastructure to work together in order to form the necessary playground for ecological progress. A “center for innovation” is no longer centralized, it’s a series of interconnected modules that mimic the structure of how we process knowledge itself. It’s an open library, it’s built for communication.

Essential resources (such as food and electricity) are “broken” into smaller pockets within their communities. If communities inform and maintain their own life-sustaining modules, then they can collectively contribute to a collection of potential methodologies for the use of other communities. In addition, communities aren’t permanent structures - they are in constant shift and reorganization.

This is crucial to enable a sustainable system, encouraging citizen involvement to improve these systems.

The community itself can make decisions on how they’ll get their “best” food, how much electricity they need, their intellectual expression, communication techniques, and technologies. The city itself provides archival and translation.

This only works in conjunction with technology. Within hubs throughout the city, there’s a focus on the elements that are essential for innovation - accessible education, tools for archival, and translation (of every language - including programming languages).

From these hubs, stem flexible space that can be used for essentials (such as generating electricity or food), meeting, living, and dining areas, hobbies and activity spaces, etc. Shared spaces, shared resources, and equipment for the benefit and use of all natural systems.

If this thinking is accurate, the “hub”  of the city isn’t a hub at all. It’s a collection of smaller hubs spread across the entire site and connected by transit, technology/internet, and logistics networks.


We must be able to rapidly move and adapt based on the needs of ever-changing communities. Innovation doesn’t happen statically; it’s the movement of people, ideas, and resources. Sustainability doesn’t happen in isolation, it’s about the personal connection to our environment and the objects within it.

Distributed communities of specialists collaborate to explore different solutions to a bigger problem. The hubs of innovation are where they ideas come together. There’s power in the collective energy that’s driven by passionate individuals.

- Excerpt from Project Writings

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Each different phase of the creative process, adapted from the strategies commonly used for Design Thinking, has unique implications for physical, digital, and in-between touch points.

Essentially the type of environments necessary for certain stages of the creative process vary dramatically - a city that is designed to facilitate innovation, would require dramatically diverse environments.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Textural Moodboard for Visual / Architectural Storytelling


Actual Renders from the project presentation, Created primarily in Unreal Engine + C4D

Render - Bio-Scanning of Plants

Render - Coral Reef Restoration

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Example Presentation Slide 1 - Nature is the best canvas possible. Materials are still malleable at this stage, providing the ability for endless expression without endless production. Not only are these activities meditative, but they also provide benefit past just the self. Some works can be permanent, but works can always be photographed/archived for the future.



Example Presentation Slide 2 - Games have proven so much about our ability to work together for collective good. They are a cheap, collaborative prototyping lab. An international research facility. Anyone, of any age, can contribute to the exploration of legitimate, ongoing research - if they provide the right tools.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Finally, this whiteboard outlines some of the initial synthesis of research that would continue to outline strategy for this entire project.