For this project, I had the opportunity to be thrown into the unknown.
Neom is a planned city in the Tabuk Province of northwestern Saudi Arabia. It is planned to incorporate smart city technologies and to function as a tourist destination. The site is north of the Red Sea, east of Egypt across the Strait of Tiran, and south of Jordan. It will cover a total area of 26,500 km2 and will extend 460 km along the coast of the Red Sea.
Saudi Arabia aims to complete the first section of Neom by 2025. The project has an estimated cost of $500 billion
My challenge was to design a manifestation of an elegant notification – what would it look like, feel like, smell like, sense like? What would the cognitive core of NEOM be like? Because it was design challenge I was also limited to turn it around in 5 hours.
Elegant notification is a part of a multi-sensory experience that happens at the city of NEOM.
We call elegant notifications “signature moments” that elevate the lasting and special experience the people experience everywhere they go.
An elegant notification should manifest itself as a multi-sensory (motion, sound, visual) symbol of a notification. It is immersive and familiar, indicating that the city is working for the person, like the blue light circulating Alexa. It should be embedded in all touchpoints at NEOM, from physical to digital, as it is a symbol of the cognitive core of the city.
- Elegance
- Non intrusive
- Feels like a touch of your loved one
- Non-boring if repeated thousand times a day, but familiar
- Unique for NEOM
Vague is probably the best term to sum up, the use case, but yet I was excited by this as the only limit was my imagination. This can be a scary space for most people, luckily I'm not most people. This was my chance to showcase my creativity, UI skills, and ability to turn vague ideas into communication.
Client input
Amira is a person living in NEOM. She is a very active person and tends to multitask a lot.
Amira’s biorhythmic calendar asks her to focus on activities that do not take too much cognitive pressure for her.
It is said that the human body has three rhythms with a fixed cycle.
1. Physical biorhythm (23-day cycles) is related to physical strength, durability, resistance, stamina, courage and etc..
2. Emotional biorhythm (28-day cycles) is related to emotional stability, feeling, intuition, mood, susceptibility, creativity and etc.
3. Intellectual biorhythm (33-day cycles) is related to thinking, analyzing, judgment, concentration, composition and etc.
Positive periods of the cycle indicate high ability days and its negative periods show low ability days. Near zero means critical days.
- Think about Netflix when a show starts, or when Alexa ”lights up”.
- Think about Google Nest informing about things around.
- Have you seen the movie “Her”? How does Samantha communicate?
- How does TARS from “Interstellar” communicate with the team?
Immersive but yet familiar, indicating that the city is working. It is embedded in all touchpoints at NEOM, from physical to digital. We are utilising the cognitive cores' facial recognition and its data API services to provide a genuinely hyper-personalised experience to its end users.
Design is about breathing life into ideas, and I wanted to bring everything to life as much as possible for the client. The best way to do this was to create a motion animation using Adobe After Effects, given I had only a short amount of time before I had to present back my content and process to a broader team.
The client was delighted by my creation and the enthusiastic way of presenting my work.
They are building the future social infrastructure, and they spend lots of time envisioning what those interactions will be like in the future. They need to visualise them and communicate these grand ideas.
I was able to do just that and showcase my talents in a short space of time. I demonstrated my ability to work comfortably in the unknown and turn a conceptual idea into something tangible.