PAST PROJECT

Shape Your City

Citizen Engagement Platform for Dubai Masterplan 2040

Interactive Data Visualization App Design & Development Interactive Installation

Shape Your City is an interactive installation and gamified web-app developed for Dubai Design Week 2021. It presents the Dubai 2040 Master Plan and invites citizens to contribute to its co-design. By merging physical exhibition design with digital participation tools, the project explores how installation design and gamification can promote inclusive citizen engagement in sustainable urban planning.

WHY?

Urban planning often overlooks everyday citizens. Shape Your City empowers public voices through interactive tools, making city-making more inclusive, transparent, and responsive to real community needs

WHAT?

Shape Your City is a hybrid digital-physical installation that transforms public participation into urban planning data—enabling citizens to help shape the city’s future through accessible, tech-enabled co-design.

HOW?

The project uses a custom-designed web application and digital-physical exhibition setup to gather and visualize public input across themes like mobility, zoning, landscape, and culture. A real-time data visualization captured insights on a live city map.

WHERE?

The project premiered at Dubai Design Week 2021 at the D3 Architecture Exhibition and was later featured at international academic forums including Responsive Cities 2023 and DIGICOM 2022.

WHEN?

The project was developed and prototyped during 2021, with real-time engagement running throughout the Dubai Design Week exhibition period and continuing through academic dissemination.

WITH?

Shape Your City was co-created by RMJM, the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI), DesertInk, and AESG—collaborating to prototype interactive urban engagement tools for Dubai’s future.

LAYER 01

Mobility

The mobility layer introduces the visitors to the future transport plans for Dubai and allows them to suggest new mobility routes on the app: walking path, cycling path, hyperloop track, boat path and air tram path.

LAYER 02

Landscape

This layer explores Dubai’s evolving natural environment. The physical panels present key landscape strategies, while the app allows users to add elements such as native trees, green parks, water features, and natural reserves—envisioning a more sustainable urban ecology.

LAYER 03

Community

The community layer focuses on the 15-minute city model. Visitors learn about neighborhood planning through physical content, and on the app, they select a neighborhood and place essential amenities like schools, clinics, cultural spaces, and farmers’ markets to shape vibrant local living.

LAYER 04

Culture

The journey concludes at a live data visualization panel, where all visitor inputs are aggregated and displayed in real-time on a large digital map. This final moment transforms individual contributions into a collective urban vision—offering a shared, evolving snapshot of how Dubai’s future could be co-imagined by its citizens.