Jan 22, 2025
Economic Diversification by Design
Infrastructuring and Platforming the GCC’s Future—Through Strategic Capital, Data Flows, and Design Intelligence
Authors
Deaa Bataineh
Carlos Teixeira
Published on
LinkedIn
In February 2025, Carlos Teixeira and Deaa Bataineh traveled across Riyadh and Dubai to engage with leaders in higher education, policymaking, global consultancies, investment funds, and public and private institutions at the forefront of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s economic transformation. Their goal was to understand how economic diversification—often framed as a policy objective—is now unfolding as a design practice. Through multiple visits and discussions with an emerging airline, innovation hubs, insurance companies, and cultural institutions, they observed a powerful convergence: long-term capital allocation, data-driven systems, and everyday infrastructures are being orchestrated not by serendipity but increasingly through design logics. What follows is a reflective dialogue on this regional shift, grounded in firsthand observations, discussions, and a shared fascination with the future taking shape in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the MENA region at large.
Designing futures in motion—speculative infrastructures in Dubai's Museum of the Future; the future of EV and Charging.
From legacy systems to native platforms.
Most economies evolve by making incremental adaptations in existing infrastructure to serve ever-evolving dynamics of everyday life. These adaptations are often constrained by outdated regulations, bureaucratic systems, legacy structures, and institutional inertia. But in the Gulf, they are not retrofitting the past—they are building native platforms and infrastructures from scratch.
As native systems, new platforms and infrastructures are being designed without constraints from the past, enabling them to be purpose-fit for contemporary conditions. In effect, many of these initiatives start with an encouragement to reach full, untapped potential—a rare opportunity for those designing infrastructures. Such audacity gives rise to entirely new infrastructural models, capable of integrating knowledge traditionally dispersed across sectors and industries, such as food, finance, retail, entertainment, and logistics, into holistic systems.
Unlike retrofits, they are modular, data-integrated infrastructures that scale efficiently and respond to emerging cultural, technological, environmental, and economic contexts. With capital flows redirected from oil and gas into sovereign investment funds, countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are using design capabilities to scaffold entirely new sectors, from digital health and mobility to cultural tourism and AI-enabled experiences. These are not merely sectors—they are being shaped as investable asset classes, attracting long-term capital and designed to deliver economic, cultural, and societal returns. Through frameworks such as the Strategic Choice-Making Model (SCMM), which Deaa has developed in his doctoral research—access here—as a tool to align design choices with institutional purpose, it becomes possible to support such transformation deliberately. This model offers a lens to reflect on what is already unfolding across the region.
Deaa describes one particular pattern as “agile benchmarking”: scanning the best-in-class global solutions, adapting them contextually, and assembling them into modular platforms and infrastructures that are both investable and transformative. In the Gulf, this agile logic is often observed in practice—even if not yet formalized as a method. This modular orchestration allows designers to recombine features quickly, enabling rapid prototyping at the scale of cities, sectors, and public life.
Carlos: Deaa, what stood out to me was the energy—the atmosphere of ambition and possibility. The systems we saw weren’t upgrades. They were new compositions. But how do you see this difference showing up in something as everyday as, say, insurance?
Deaa: It’s a great example. Most people think of insurance as rigid and reactive. But what we saw at Tawuniya Insurance in Riyadh—especially in our conversation with Amin Basalamah and Ahmad Hasan—was a redefinition of insurance as a behavioral infrastructure. They’re not just processing claims. They’re shaping how people drive, how they park, and how they stay healthy. It’s platform logic applied to public well-being. And because they’re building it from scratch, they can embed incentives, real-time feedback, and data flows that make it both preventative and systemic.
Carlos: That makes sense. And it’s something we heard echoed at Riyadh Air | طيران الرياض when we met with Daniel Tuitt and his service design team. Designing an airline from scratch—without legacy systems—creates ideal conditions for systems-level design. From full in-flight meal redesigns that reflect health and sustainability priorities, to data-enabled personalization that anticipates passenger needs. It’s not just transportation—it’s mobility as infrastructure.
Deaa: Exactly. That’s what I mean when I say they’re infrastructuring the future. They’re designing mobility, not just transportation. Insurance that guides behavior. Tourism that’s bundled with education and heritage. One powerful example was the waterfront fish market in Dubai—it reimagines food, logistics, real estate, retail, and entertainment as integrated everyday infrastructure.
Waterfront Fish Market: More than seafood—the waterfront market reimagines food, logistics, and entertainment as integrated civic infrastructure.
Carlos: Yes, that was remarkable. The logistics choreography was like a supply chain ballet; From market to plate, with a data token following every step. You pick your fish, and suddenly there’s a chain reaction—cleaning, coding, cooking, and delivery. And all of it orchestrated across multiple vendors, restaurants, and kitchens, but completely seamless for the user. It reminded me of FedEx’s tracking system—but for dinner.
Deaa: That’s the magic of modular orchestration. And they’re applying the same logic across sectors. At the Museum of the Future in Dubai, for instance, we saw speculative concepts for EV charging that draw on global best practices and combine them in culturally specific ways.
Carlos: Which connects back to agile benchmarking. At several institutions, we saw teams conducting benchmarking sprints—not to imitate, but to compose. Weekly sprints where they evaluate new features from anywhere in the world, test them for cultural and infrastructural fit, and plug them into a bigger platform and broader systems.
Deaa: Exactly. The discovery is global, but the assembly is local. It’s a methodological shift. Traditionally, design often starts from user insight and discovery. But here, the discovery is already happening globally. The challenge is curatorial: how to assemble investable infrastructures contextually. It’s not about a breakthrough invention. It’s about contextual integration at scale. This is where the Strategic Choice-Making Model (SCMM) can offer value—aligning institutional purpose with infrastructural design. While it’s not yet in use here, the model helps make sense of how choices today shape economic logic tomorrow—especially when you’re not just solving a problem but shaping an entire sector. –Link to Deaa’s defense presentation, here–
Carlos: Our discussion with Giulio Quaggiotto, the innovation advisor at the Prime Minister’s Office in Dubai, helped us reflect on the state of legacy and native systems. Through our conversation, we realized that legacy models of innovation often fall short in this region—not because they’re flawed, but because they don’t match the institutional realities here. In the Gulf, innovation is being authored contextually.
Deaa: That’s what’s so powerful—design isn’t just creative. It’s strategic. It’s rethinking how institutions work. The Gulf is developing its own grammar of transformation.
Riyadh Air: The airline that is yet to be launched, reimagines travel through AI, logistics, and sustainability.
Designing purpose-built ecosystems.
If the Gulf’s transformation is infrastructural, its underlying material is human capital. The systemic change we observed was not just top-down—it was personal. Many of the designers, strategists, and innovators shaping these platforms were educated abroad and returned home not just to implement, but to lead. This return of talent marks a deeper shift: from importing innovation models to authoring new ones, with the fluency to operate across disciplines. The roundtable at Dar Al Uloom University, co-led by Dean Noorh Albadi, PhD, and Vice Dean Jamil Binabid, PhD. The roundtable brought together public and private sector actors, along with policy, design, and investment leaders. Here, economic diversification wasn’t framed as a challenge—it was a shared horizon. In the case of Saudi Arabia’s heritage sector, for example, architects, historians, engineers, and digital designers are collaborating to platformize cultural sites—turning preservation into a sector of immersive tourism and civic education.
Dar Al Uloom University Roundtable: Future in dialogue—educators, designers, and investors gather to align vision with execution at Dar Al Uloom University.
Carlos: That roundtable at Dar Al Uloom was one of my highlights. The discussion wasn’t just conceptual—it was about systems design as a lived, local practice. And the composition of the room—design practitioners, investors, faculty, leaders, former students—spoke volumes.
Deaa: Exactly. It was a coalition of actors. Cross-disciplinary and strategically aligned. Architects were thinking through health platforms. Policy advisors considering mobility ecosystems. Design is no longer siloed—it’s a strategic capacity.
Carlos: I was moved to see how seriously they take their role in shaping the nation’s future. The idea that design is not downstream of economics, but actually upstream—authoring possibilities.
Deaa: Yes—and there’s a historical awareness, too. These are people who understand they’re at a pivotal moment. They see Vision 2030 not just as a policy document, but as a design brief. A generational prompt. “How do we build infrastructures that reflect who we are becoming?”
Carlos: That’s the future of design education, right there. Multigenerational, interdisciplinary, strategically aligned.
Deaa: Absolutely, they’re part of a whole grammar for infrastructuring public life.
If oil was the defining resource of the 20th-century Gulf economy, data is quickly becoming its 21st-century equivalent—not just as a byproduct of services, but as a raw material of design. Across aviation, healthcare, energy, and culture, data is being used not simply to inform strategy but to construct infrastructure. Throughout the visits to Riyadh Air | طيران الرياض, the Museum of the Future, or the Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO), a clear pattern emerged: data is being treated as a material. It’s used to choreograph services, inform user experiences, and model system behaviors in real time. This changes what platforms are and how they evolve. As Deaa noted, “We are not only designing with data—we are designing through it.”
Carlos: What fascinated me was how designing from scratch lets you use data from the beginning—not just for personalization, but for shaping behavior, logistics, and sustainability. Similar to our in-flight meals—access here—work, but at a national scale.
Deaa: Exactly. Data becomes the interface between intention and infrastructure. It’s no longer passive. It’s shaping choices, informing investment, and creating new archetypes. At the Museum of the Future, we saw speculative examples—from flying taxis to lunar solar panels—all mapped through data flows.
Carlos: And at the Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO), we saw the geopolitical side. Their Digital Economy Navigator isn’t just a benchmarking tool—it’s a design tool for shaping national strategies with data as the connective tissue.
Deaa: That’s why data is a design material. Connecting intention to action. Design becomes a choreography of decisions powered by live insight.
Data as a Designable Medium.
Carlos and Deaa’s visit to the MBR School of Government in Dubai included a conversation with Prof. Khalid W. Wazani. The conversation brought to the table the proposition that design doesn’t just deliver economic outcomes—it co-authors them. In doing so, we revisited the work of the late John Heskett, a professor at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Institute of Technology, who argued that design produces value. Design and the Creation of Value, John Heskett, book here.
Design as an economic actor.
MBR School of Government visit: Theoretical foundations, practical futures — Carlos and Deaa with Prof. Khalid Wazani discussing design’s economic agency.
Carlos: That conversation helped crystallize our reflections. Design is shaping not only how the economy functions, but what it aims for. For economies like the GCC, this is more than theory. It’s praxis.
Deaa: In the Gulf, design is helping redefine prosperity—through social resilience, sustainability, and relevance. It’s not an add-on. It’s foundational. It fuses policy and product.
Carlos: Deaa, this trip gave us language for what we were seeing. Design in the GCC can help not only in shaping how the economy works, but also what it prioritizes.
Deaa: And in doing so, it’s building new forms of governance—platforms that perform like private entities but are guided by public values. It’s the fusion of policy and product.
Carlos: Exactly. The GCC isn’t just diversifying its economy. It’s redefining what prosperity means. It’s designing the meaning of growth.
Diagram – Economic Diversification by Design: A conceptual model linking design capabilities to capital allocation, data orchestration, and sector transformation.
The observation Deaa and Carlos had in the Gulf is not the gradual spread of policy reform but the emergence of a design-centered grammar for economic transformation. Capital is being linked to infrastructure. Education is being linked to leadership. Data is being linked to public value. Examples abound—EV charging, aviation services, heritage tourism, behavioral insurance, or the waterfront fish market—all showing how sectors like food, finance, retail, entertainment, and logistics are becoming investable infrastructures.
Data nurtures these shifts. But they require models that help make sense of complexity. That’s where the Strategic Choice-Making Model (SCMM) comes in—as a framework to support the Gulf’s ability to design its own future systems. [Link to Deaa’s dissertation document, here]
Economic diversification is not simply a transition from oil to innovation. It is a multidimensional orchestration—of people, platforms, places, policies, capital, and resources at large. The Gulf offers a compelling model of how future economies might be designed. From white canvas to asset class. From global benchmarks to local grammars. From data to meaning.
We’re grateful to everyone who welcomed us, shared their work, and contributed to our learning throughout this journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Deaa Bataineh is a designer, researcher, and consultant specializing in innovation at the intersection of systems, design, and strategy. He holds a PhD from the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he developed the Strategic Choice-Making© model. His work addresses complex infrastructures—such as EV charging, emergency response, and digital payments—as platforms for equitable and sustainable transformation. He serves on the Aux Board of the Design Museum of Chicago, co-founded the design department at Jordan University of Science and Technology in Jordan, and hosts the podcast espresso?. For more visit Deaa’s website here.
Carlos Teixeira is a designer, professor, and consultant with over 20 years of experience working at the intersection of design strategy, open innovation, and systemic transformation. He is the Charles L. Owen Professor in Design and Director of the PhD Program at the Institute of Design (ID), Illinois Institute of Technology, where he leads research and teaching on infrastructure design, innovation platforms, and global collaboration. A native of Brazil, Carlos previously served as Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design - The New School in NYC and is known for co-creating the DREAM:IN Project, recognized by Metropolis Magazine as a 2013 Game Changer. To learn more about Carlos’s work, visit this website, here.