To research and develop the full content for the UAE National Pavilion at Expo 2015 Milan, a landmark building designed by Foster + Partners for the National Media Council of Abu Dhabi.

The theme of the pavilion was world food needs and the UAE's contribution to developing sustainable energy, agriculture and water use: an ambitious and complex brief that required translating cutting-edge science and national policy into a visitor experience compelling enough to stop and hold a multinational Expo audience.

Narrative Masterplanning | Research | Content Development | Design Integration | Interactive Media Development

As part of the core project team, we worked closely with experts and organisations across the UAE, including Masdar City and other scientific partners, to research and develop content that was both rigorously accurate and genuinely accessible.

We facilitated workshops to develop themes and concepts, and developed the communication strategy for a sequence of powerful interactive media encounters throughout the pavilion.

The finale was a mixed-media transforming environment that looked at the UAE's future through the eyes of young Emiratis, a deliberately personal and forward-looking conclusion to a pavilion that had moved from the deep past of the desert landscape through the science of sustainable innovation to the human possibilities of the next generation.

Expo pavilions are one of the most demanding contexts for narrative direction: the audience is multinational, multilingual and moving through dozens of competing pavilions in a single day.

The story has to land immediately, travel across cultural and linguistic boundaries without losing its specificity, and leave visitors with something they can carry away from the experience.

Generic national promotion doesn't do that. A story grounded in genuine scientific innovation and human vision does.

The Foster + Partners building presented a particular interpretive opportunity and challenge simultaneously: spaces of extraordinary visual power that demanded content capable of holding their own alongside the architecture.

Client: National Media Council, Abu Dhabi

TGA: Narrative Masterplanning, Research, Content Development, Design Integration, Interactive Media Development

Partners: Foster + Partners (Architecture), Land Design Studio (Exhibition Design), Masdar (Scientific Partnership)