Executive Summary
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 places cities at the centre of economic diversification, innovation, and improved quality of life. As urban centres like Madinah transform into smart cities, two disciplines have emerged as critical success enablers: Experience Design (XD) and Enterprise Architecture (EA). These frameworks ensure that technology, design, and human needs align to deliver integrated, scalable, and resilient urban experiences.
1. Experience Design: Elevating Human-Centric Urbanism
A City Experience Design Office (CXDO) ensures the physical, digital, and service layers of a city are orchestrated around real human needs. In Madinah, Sunio One’s CXDO work shows how XD:
- Creates inclusive, intuitive, and culturally resonant experiences across city services and public spaces.
- Supports strategic programs like the City Living Museum, Green Homes, and Madinah Links, translating urban goals into tangible, lived experiences.
- Functions in a franchise model, serving diverse city departments (e.g., health, mobility, heritage), delivering seamless user journeys through data-driven and participatory design methods.
2. Enterprise Architecture: Structuring Urban Transformation
Enterprise Architecture through a City Architecture Office (CAO) brings structure and accountability to complex urban ecosystems. Sunio One’s CAO services for Madinah exemplify how EA:
- Ensures alignment with national frameworks like DGA NORA for consistent digital transformation across ministries and city initiatives.
- Builds shared architectural models, control systems, and data governance that streamline implementation across city programs.
- Provides continuous evaluation of technological readiness, integration pathways, and delivery governance to de-risk innovation.
3. The Power of Alignment: Why Experience Design and Enterprise Architecture Are Stronger Together
Cities must unify emotional, human-facing experiences with deep system-level architecture. XD and EA are inseparable in effective smart city delivery:
- XD defines what the city should feel like; EA defines how it is made possible.
- Together, they create Experience Blueprints that ensure design visions are executable, scalable, and resilient.
- They prevent siloed development, enable agile rollouts, and reduce technology waste.
- Unified design and architecture result in cohesive city identities, creating memorable, trustworthy, and delightful urban ecosystems.
4. XD and EA as the Core of City-Making
Experience Design and Enterprise Architecture do more than deliver services and systems — they shape the very act of city-making.
XD and EA operate as overarching, integrative disciplines that:
- Define the strategic intent and experiential vision of the city.
- Influence and guide urban planning, urban design, infrastructure development, mobility, sustainability, and cultural programming.
- Ensure all other disciplines work from a shared blueprint of purpose and impact, aligned to resident, visitor, and institutional needs.
Where urban design may focus on streetscapes and public spaces, XD ensures those places feel intuitive and delightful to navigate. Where urban planning may determine land use and zoning, EA ensures data platforms, governance structures, and interoperability exist to support service delivery across those zones.
In this sense, XD and EA are strategic integrators — ensuring that the physical, digital, and social components of a city function as a unified ecosystem. They are not just support functions, but the glue that binds siloed disciplines into a coherent whole.
As Saudi Arabia builds its future cities, XD and EA provide the connective tissue between tradition and technology, aspiration and action, policy and people.
5. Strategic Implications for Saudi Cities
Enabling Human-Centric National Transformation
XD enables the design of emotionally resonant experiences; EA ensures they’re implemented efficiently and securely. This makes national transformation goals real in everyday life.
Accelerating Smart City Readiness
XD + EA power key smart city capabilities:
| Capability | Enabled by |
| Integrated mobility | XD-informed service design + EA-defined intermodal platforms |
| Predictive safety | EA-governed data + XD for interface design |
| Digital services | Unified journeys (XD) + backend interoperability (EA) |
Building Globally Recognized City Brands
XD creates a city’s emotional and cultural resonance; EA ensures consistency and reliability. This combination builds trust and magnetism for global tourism, talent, and investment.
Future-Proofing Infrastructure and Investment
XD + EA support agile adaptation to new policies, tech, and user behaviors. They reduce costly retrofits and ensure optimal ROI on public and private urban investments.
Strengthening Intercity Collaboration
XD enables experience standards; EA ensures system-level compatibility across cities. This supports national-level coordination, shared services, and infrastructure efficiency.
Laying the Foundation for the Post-Oil Economy
By making cities more liveable, intuitive, and competitive, XD + EA fuel entrepreneurship, creative industries, tourism, and knowledge economies. They transform city-making into a strategic economic lever.
6. The Risks of Omission: What Happens Without XD and EA?
While XD and EA offer significant value, their absence poses equally significant risk. Without these frameworks:
- Citizen and visitor experiences become fragmented, leading to confusion, dissatisfaction, and disengagement.
- Smart city investments underperform, as disconnected systems and non-aligned platforms create redundancy, delays, and unscalable solutions.
- Innovation efforts fail to scale, with isolated pilots not translating into broader programs due to lack of architectural foundations.
- Design becomes disconnected from infrastructure, creating beautiful but unbuildable plans or functional but uninspiring spaces.
- Decision-making becomes reactive rather than strategic, relying on intuition rather than insight and evidence.
- National cohesion weakens, as cities adopt divergent systems, tools, and user experience standards.
In short, without XD and EA, the smart city risks becoming a “smart façade” — technology-rich but human-poor, modern-looking but operationally fragile.
Conclusion
Saudi Arabia stands at the crossroads of ancient heritage and digital innovation. With Experience Design and Enterprise Architecture institutionalized through CXDOs and CAOs, cities like Madinah are not just becoming smarter — they are becoming more livable, lovable, and sustainable. The fusion of these disciplines is key to realizing Vision 2030’s urban future: dynamic, resilient, and deeply human.
How Sunio One Can Help
Sunio One brings hands-on experience and award-winning methodologies in both XD and EA, tailored for Saudi Arabia’s unique cultural, historical, and strategic context. We can help:
- Establish and operationalize CXDO and CAO offices aligned with national frameworks.
- Design and implement citizen-first smart city experiences using agile, inclusive design thinking.
- Architect scalable, secure city systems that align with DGA standards and smart city requirements.
- Build internal capability through knowledge transfer and training for Saudi leadership and teams.
Whether at the city level or through national initiatives, Sunio One is a strategic partner ready to co-design the future of Saudi urbanism — a future that delivers for people, government, and the planet.
