A 6D Synthetic Twin combines geospatial environments, data, time, scenarios and synthetic people so decision-makers can manipulate variables and explore possible futures before making real-world choices.
My work evolved from designing individual experiences inside the platform to asking a bigger question:
What should the platform itself know how to do?
These figures describe the scale of the technology rather than my individual design impact. They illustrate the environment the interface needed to support: physical places, infrastructure, data, context, time and never-identified Synthetic Populations inside interactive simulations.
Maps, data panels and scenario controls support different questions across projects.
Municipal boundaries and business locations establish the regional context.
A density legend and city-level counts make the business layer easier to read at provincial scale.
A cross-project montage alongside two views of Aksis: business locations in Greater Edmonton and business density across Alberta. Open any image to inspect the details at original size.
Housing vulnerability, regional development, wildfire resilience, infrastructure investment and health naturally produced custom solutions. But after enough projects, recurring interaction needs became visible.
Stop solving the same UX problem project by project. Start designing capabilities.
Four storyboard versions show how map views, controls and data panels evolved together.
Related states keep the place visible while adding information.
Different destinations use a recognizable relationship between labels, place and detail.
The storyboard iterations and Brampton map-state sequences reveal recurring needs for orientation, selection and deeper information.
Generalize too quickly and the product fills with abstractions nobody needs. Generalize too slowly and every project rebuilds the same thing.
A specific answer to a specific delivery.
A repeated problem across projects and audiences.
A reusable solution that improves future delivery and the core product.
Client need
Project solution
Pattern identified
Reusable capability
Next project starts stronger
Delivery became product research.
We reinvested time into an integrated toggle and legend, dynamic entity dashboards, fewer manually edited assets and stronger interface cohesion.
Reuse doesn’t only reduce effort. It creates room for better design.
The Edmonton view plots business locations by category within city districts.
The Alberta view connects layer selection with density markers and a legend that explains their scale.
Every experience could carry a different geography, dataset, client identity, industry, narrative and level of complexity. Making everything identical wasn’t the goal. Making everything behave predictably was.
Consistency didn’t mean sameness. It meant predictability.
A shared grid defines where controls, data panels and navigation sit around the map.
The same specification covers icon assets, dimensions and spacing for related toolbar actions.
Familiar controls support project-specific layers, while the legend explains how engineering risk and social vulnerability combine.
Shared colour scales and an icon library give teams options for different projects without starting from scratch.
Technical recipes, scripts and API-driven behaviour enabled enormous flexibility, but also created dependence on people who understood the implementation. We asked whether more platform power could become accessible without requiring code authoring.
Scripted rules define how building colours change with scenario and year.
A structured form exposes settings such as image placement and display directly in the map interface.
Filtering, entities, attributes, panels, overlays, animation, live data, scenario recipes and spatial relationships could not be designed independently from the systems that produced them.
Design became a conversation between experience goals, technical reality and future leverage.
The person panel handoff specifies how resilience, needs and vulnerability data appear in the interface.
Annotations tie counts and ownership bars to positions, typography and colour so changing values remain readable.
A guided experience helps many decision-makers. Technical and scientific users may need data origin, assumptions, model logic and deeper controls. For them, hiding complexity can reduce trust.
Same intelligence. Different depth.
Government, scientific and evidence-driven users needed data-source references, update state and confidence in provenance. Live-data integration also expanded the product beyond prepared scenarios, including live wildfire data in Synthetic Canada.
The map shows each risk separately and highlights where they overlap.
The Web Map Service menu lets users add layers such as landslide risk without leaving the map.
The reference panel names the source, links to its catalogue and shows the years covered by the wildfire density dataset.
A visualization becomes more credible when users can interrogate the evidence behind it.
Before
After
A 3× shorter wait preserved the mental continuity of comparing scenarios.
Manual graphics work until data changes, another client needs the pattern, colours need to respond dynamically or fifteen variations appear. Later projects moved more visual decisions into the platform itself.
Persona and community hub panels use different inputs but share year and solar adoption controls.
The specification separates milestone positions, colour and selection so the timeline can show different states without redrawing the whole control.
Four cross-tool Fusion demonstrations showed how the platform could work alongside existing spatial and visualization tools rather than demanding an entirely closed workflow.
A recorded workflow showing how Google Earth and Holodeck can work with the same geographic context.
A recorded workflow connecting terrain preparation in Blender with the Holodeck environment.
The interface only worked when those pieces worked together. My role increasingly meant translating business questions into experience requirements, technical constraints into design decisions, and repeated UX problems into potential product capabilities.
A project-specific solution can be fast today and expensive tomorrow.
Anything driven by changing data eventually needs rules, not screenshots.
Simplification helps some audiences and frustrates others.
A powerful interface feels less powerful when users don’t know where to begin.
Not every client request deserves a permanent place in the core product.
An emerging capability had to solve a repeated problem, generalize as an interaction, reduce future effort, improve the experience, fit the technical system and strengthen the core product.
Existing environments and platform assets helped the team respond quickly to current events and market conversations. Three pieces were produced across approximately three days, reinforcing that reusable investment creates value outside the product team.