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franbencosme

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Product design · since 2008
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Laboratorio de Innovación Digital · Dominican government · 2021–2022 · website 3 months, 3D world 2

A website, and a 3D townyou explore on a scooter.

I designed the innovation lab’s website, which had to earn the trust of ministries. Then I proposed something bigger: a 3D town where each part of the lab is a place you drive to on a scooter. It started as pencil sketches in a notebook, and it’s still online.

Open the 3D world →3d.laboratorio.gob.do
The 3D world on three phones: riding past the Laboratorio sign, a project card opening, exploring the OGTIC zone
The 3D world on a phone: moving around, interacting, exploring. Live at 3d.laboratorio.gob.do.
At a glance
What I did
The product vision, the website, the 3D concept as product owner, and the research
What I did not do
Building the 3D world. Front-end, back-end and 3D engineers built the town; I designed it and decided what it was for.
Time
3 months for the website · 2 months for the 3D world
With whom
Front-end, back-end and 3D engineers
For whom
The lab, and the government ministries it needed to win over
The problem

Ministries won’t bring their problems to a lab they don’t understand. The website had to explain how the lab works clearly enough to earn their trust. Then we went further: instead of another page, a place you could visit.

The point was to show that a government office can make more than forms.

The screens of the LID site laid out at an angle: the pillars, the projects, a director’s quote, the calls for proposals
The website came first: the lab’s areas, projects and open calls. It had to win over the ministries before the 3D world could exist.
The constraint

Old phones, slow connections, little patience, and people who had never used anything like it. We designed for the worst case first.

It had to be light and work on any screen: the 3D world had to run on the same phones people use to fill in government forms.

The LID portal sketched by hand on paper: home, portfolio and sub-sites
The website sketched by hand first: home, projects, sub-sites. Paper is where we cut what wasn’t needed.
Four notebook pages: isometric plazas with people and screens, and a hand-drawn map of the Dominican Republic with the zones marked
The 3D world before it was 3D: the squares and the map of the country, sketched in the notebook.
What changed starteddroppedbecamekept
  1. Started as — a website sketched by hand, starting from the lab’s services, not from the screens.
  2. Dropped — most of the grey test version. We built the whole town in plain grey blocks first to test the scooter ride; if the ride was boring in grey, no texture would save it.
  3. Became — a town you explore on a scooter, with the lab’s projects on billboards and a building that shows how the team works.
  4. Kept — the 3D world itself. 3d.laboratorio.gob.do is still online, years later.
The 3D pipeline on one board: the service map, the reference list, the grey-box blocking, the notebook sketches, the isometric town in colour, and the characters
The whole process on one board: service map, references, grey blocks, the notebook, the town in colour and the characters.
The director general of the lab on stage at the launch, the LID mark on the screen behind him
The launch. After it, the lab was seen as a team that delivers, and started taking on projects.
Results
Explore the 3D world yourself

A project by Fran Bencosme · PortfolioA project by Fran Bencosme · Portfolio