Foresight for Tomorrow: What Expo 2030 Riyadh Asks of National Storytelling
In October 2030, the eyes of the world turn to Riyadh. Over six months, Saudi Arabia will host World Expo 2030 under the theme “Foresight for Tomorrow”, a promise that has to be delivered not just in concrete and steel, but in the stories nations choose to tell about their future. The site itself is ambitious enough: roughly six million square metres centred on Wadi Al Sulai, built to outlive the six-month event as a permanent Global Village. But the detail that should concentrate every national delegation's mind is the “One Nation, One Pavilion” model.
For the first time at this scale, every participating country gets its own dedicated pavilion, no shared halls, no diluted narratives, no hiding in a group presentation. That is a remarkable choice by the organisers, and a considerable challenge for everyone now starting to plan.
I've spent the better part of the last decade inside that particular challenge. At Expo 2015 Milan, I worked on narrative direction, content and design integration for the UAE National Pavilion. At Expo 2020 Dubai, I helped shape the concept masterplan for the Mobility zone and theme pavilion, led content development for the UAE National Pavilion, and carried full narrative development, content direction and design integration for the UK National Pavilion. Each of those projects took years, not months, from first concepts to opening day. That lead time is the thing people underestimate most about this work: the pavilion a visitor walks through was conceived in a completely different world to the one it opens in.
That gap matters more for Riyadh than for any expo I've worked on. Between now and October 2030, three forces will keep reshaping what “the future” even means: the accelerating normalisation of AI and what it does to the future of work; the hard economics and politics of environmental pressure and energy transition; and a period of political instability and social change that remapping the landscape of how nations relate to one another. A pavilion narrative locked down today against today's anxieties will look dated, or worse, naive, by the time the doors open. The teams that get this right won't be the ones with the best answers to 2026's questions. They'll be the ones asking the right questions about the world of 2030 and beyond.
There's also a layer specific to the host that raises the stakes further. Expo 2030 lands in the same year Saudi Arabia set as the horizon for Vision 2030, its own generational programme of economic and social transformation. That's not a coincidence any storyteller should ignore. Riyadh isn't only building a stage for other nations to perform on, it's showcasing its own results, in its own capital, in the year it promised to. Every pavilion on that site, including the Kingdom's own, will be read against that backdrop whether its content addresses it directly or not.
That context should change how delegations approach the expo's five interconnected sub-themes: Technology, Planet, Humanity, Culture and Collaboration. It's an opening to move past the pavilion-as-trophy-cabinet model of flags, facts, and tourism reels, toward pavilions as arguments: this is our position on how technology should serve people, this is our relationship to the planet's limits, this is what we believe collaboration between nations should look like now.
That's a harder brief to write, and a far more valuable one to have written well. It's also exactly the kind of brief where culturally aligned storytelling and experience design, content that reflects a government's actual identity, character and purpose, rather than a generic “innovation showcase”, separates the pavilions people remember from the ones they simply walk through.
The nations and organisations starting this work now, four years out, have a good runway to think and imagine, to set the narrative direction, before anyone breaks ground on design. That's the real lesson of a decade doing this work – the narrative has to be framed years before the architecture is finished, because by the time visitors arrive, the story has to already feel like it belongs to the world they're standing in, not the one the brief was written in.
We'll be watching Riyadh closely over the next four years, not just as expo enthusiasts, but because this is exactly the kind of narrative challenge TGA: This Great Adventure exists for.
If you're starting to think about a pavilion, a national presence, or any large-scale story with a multi-year runway ahead of it, we'd welcome the conversation.