For 30 years King Abdullah dreamed of a world-class research university on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. In <1,000 days that dream had to open its doors—yet there were no doors, no faculty, no students, no brand, not even a city. Skepticism was global: Who would relocate to an empty desert? Why trust an institution that lived only in renderings?

Explaining KAUST wasn’t enough; people had to feel it. If prospective Nobel laureates, post-docs, and partners could wander the campus before concrete was poured, belief would outrun doubt. We needed to turn a construction site into an experience of arrival.

As Creative Lead on a hand-picked global team, my ask was both simple and absurd: “Make the world believe before the walls go up.”

I architected the KAUST Interactive Map—a first-of-its-kind fusion of Adobe Flash and Google Maps with custom tile overlays. We reverse-engineered Arabic text support a year before Adobe planned it, and created 20 touchpoints across 16 core areas of the campus in high-resolution with narrated 3-D flyovers. Visitors could glide from labs to marina to housing, choosing their own path through a future that suddenly felt palpable.

In the second release we doubled the number of touchpoints, delivered a fully localized Arabic UX, and highlighted the university’s sustainability story. We then installed the map on giant touchscreens across both the campus and the nearby community. Paper guides disappeared, LEED points went up, and newcomers bonded as they dropped digital pins on the places they once called home.

Hero Metrics

• 2,000,000 site visits in Year 1

• Pan Arab Web Award – Best Strategic Education Portal

• SABRE Award finalist – Innovation in Digital & Photography

• Map kiosks contributed to LEED certification

KAUST opened on schedule, fully subscribed, and already branded as a beacon of innovation, and cited by Saudi media as a model for technology-led nation-building.

When the product doesn’t yet exist, experience design must make it real. I turned a blank desert into a place people could mentally inhabit—proof that storytelling and systems thinking can bend skepticism into conviction.

Team

Andrew McClellan
| Creative Director

Kevin Freiberger
| Developer

Fady Sadeq
| Developer

Carolyn Cawley
| Executive Account Director

Will Sullivan
| Account Director

Molly Williams
| Project Manager

“The campus is a scientist’s dream… Research centers focus on vital areas such as finding alternative forms of energy and sources of potable water. The goal, university officials said, is to effectively collaborate with industry to create a new generation of researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs.”

The Washington Post