By Federica Busa & Mark Woodward
How do you create a meaningful visitor experience for 24 million people from every corner of the globe?
With the opening of Osaka Expo 2025, we thought it was the right moment to share some insights from Expo 2020 Dubai. Our challenge: designing a site-wide visitor experience for one of the largest, most diverse audiences in history. Bringing together experience strategy, planning, management, and design, our task was to ensure every visitor—whether a first-timer or a returning one—felt oriented, inspired, and connected throughout their journey.
The Challenge: Scale and Diversity
Expo 2020 welcomed 192 countries, with over 24 million visits, and had a demographic as diverse as the world itself: families, students, business leaders, tourists, and local residents. Navigating a site the size of 600 football pitches required more than signage. It required a culturally intelligent and emotionally resonant experience system.
The first step was understanding the whole picture: who was working on what, where the overlaps and gaps were, and how to bridge them. From there, we built new tools and new approaches to create spaces and moments that would be felt, shared and remembered.
Solution 1: Gamified Illustrated Maps as Experience Tools
Visitors naturally gravitated to the large pavilions along the main boulevards, often overlooking the smaller pavilions tucked within the thematic districts. More signage was not the answer.
We created layered visitor maps that served as both wayfinding tools and storytelling devices. They gamified the experience, encouraging visitors to explore unexpected corners, whether by finding the country with the spiciest sauce, discovering a traditional board game, or collecting stamps from island nations.
The maps were not just navigational. They sparked curiosity giving visitors personal reasons to explore and embark on their own global adventure.
Solution 2: Theme and Culture in the Public Realm
While World Expos are known and attended for their pavilions, visitors actually spend most of the time between them, in the public realm. That space, which is often overlooked, became our canvas.
To weave memory, culture, and emotion into the fabric of the experience, we developed dozens of thematic briefs introducing stories to international and local visitors:
The ‘Sabeel’ fountains, celebrated Emirati hospitality and contemporary regional art.
A trail of bronze medallions, embedded around Al Wasl, told untold stories of the UAE.
Interactive thematic playgrounds drew inspiration from the UAE’s future aspirations.
Graphic storytelling in bathrooms, linked everyday experiences to the Sustainable Development Goals.
The majlis structures offered original graphics and audio stories where Expo spoke in its own voice.
An open-air cultural pavilion allowed visitors to engage hands-on with artisans, fishermen, and weavers, bridging 1,000 years of heritage.
These were not forced journeys, they were invitations to linger, explore, and be surprised.
Solution 3: Humanise Connections
We quickly accepted a simple fact: most visitors prefer asking real people for help. On-ground security staff rapidly became more trusted than any app or signage. Rather than resist this, we embraced it. We worked closely with security teams to develop training and tools that empowered them to become an extension of the visitor experience; not just a presence, but a point of connection.
Queues are part of the Expo rhythm and what makes them memorable. To make queuing more comfortable, we designed, for example, hospitality bikes that carried water, various comfort items as well small storybooks adapted from a book of global children’s tales. Visitors could read and share these bite-sized stories while waiting, turning queuing into a moment of calm and discovery.
Reflecting Forward: What We Would Do Differently
For us, Expo 2020 was not just an event or a job to do. It was a chapter of our lives. Three years later, as we reflect on that time, there are a few things we would do differently:
A new logic for site exploration: For a space of that size, we would rethink and plan very early how to help visitors intuitively break down the site encouraging personalised planning without regimenting the experience and therefore compromising the serendipity of the discovery.
A public realm that showcased more real innovation: While the public realm at Expo 2020 was rich in cultural storytelling, we would want to plan very early the possibility of showcasing cutting-edge innovation outside of the framework of commercial partners and sponsors without exclusivity constraints.
A dedicated visitor design toolkit: Corporate branding alone does not resonate with World Expo audiences. We would now advocate for a branding approach that moves away from a corporate focus and is instead driven by the richness of visitor communication and engagement.
An app centered on programming, not navigation: Rather than focusing on wayfinding, the app should prioritise real-time updates on events, performances, workshops, dining options, and things to do, helping visitors curate their own experiences throughout the day. Everything else should invite discovery and exploration, rather than restrict movement through prescribed journeys.
Bigger playgrounds or simply more of them: Families make up a significant portion of Expo visitors, and playgrounds are essential spaces to take a break between pavilion visits. They offer opportunities to spend more time outdoors, extend the length of a visit, and create a more balanced day. The proximity of a café is a must to support both rest and enjoyment.
If you would like to know more about the Visitor Experience challenges, opportunities, insights and risks of World Expos, get in touch.
www.busawoodward.com or email us at: hello@busawoodward.com
#Expo2020 #ExperienceDesign #Wayfinding #VisitorExperience #Placemaking #CulturalDesign #BusaWoodward #DesignLeadership#Experiential Design #Experiential Planning
Header & Footer Illustrations / Photography: Mark Woodward
