Laboratorio de Innovación Digital · Government of the D.R. · Site 3 months, world 2 months

A website you ride through

First a site that had to earn a ministry's trust. Then the bet: not a page but a place, where every facet of the lab is somewhere you arrive on a scooter. It started as pencil in a notebook. It is still online.

Role: Product vision · product designer · 3D concept & product owner · UX research
Timeline: 3 months site · 2 months 3D world
Built with: Front end, back end and 3D engineers
Status: The 3D world is live

The 3D world of the innovation lab, ridden on a scooter past the projects zone — The lab, as a place. The projects are billboards you ride past.

Open the world full screen →

A site that had to earn trust

Three months on the site that showed how the lab works — well enough that ministries would bring it problems. It started where products start: by hand. Benchmarks of interaction and navigation, light technology with low requirements, and a user in mind who had never used anything like it.

01Define the service before the interface. Who needs what, from whom, and what proves it.
02Design for the worst case: old device, slow connection, low bandwidth for patience.
03A AAA palette for low vision, with one vibrant colour guiding each zone.
04Light, low-requirement, responsive — for a normal user with no prior experience.

The LID portal, first sketched by hand: home, portfolio and sub-sites — The portal, first by hand: home, portfolio, sub-sites. Paper is where the cutting happens.

Then the bet: not a page, a place

The second version was the risk. Each zone of the lab became somewhere you arrive on a scooter — the projects are billboards you ride past, the calls for proposals have their own plaza, and there is a building that shows how the team works inside. Two months, with 3D engineers building alongside.

None of it started on a screen. It started as pencil drawings of an isometric town, and a map of the country with the zones marked on it.

Four photographs of the original pencil sketches: isometric buildings and a hand-drawn map of the Dominican Republic — The world before the world. These are the actual notebook pages.

From grey boxes to a country

The pipeline was ordinary and the discipline was not: reference hunting, blocking the whole town in untextured grey boxes to test the ride before anything looked like anything, then materials, then characters — including a low-poly president — then the town you can actually visit.

Blocking first is the whole trick. If the ride is boring in grey boxes, no amount of texture saves it — and by then the texture costs weeks.

The 3D pipeline in one board: references, hand sketches, grey-box blocking, textured buildings, character design and the finished world — Creating the 3D site for the lab: from references and grey boxes to characters and the finished town.

What it changed

The lab started receiving proposals for games, AR and VR — things nobody had ever brought it — and projects arrived better formulated, with clearer purpose. It existed to break a mindset: to prove a public institution could make more than forms.

The screens of the LID site laid out isometrically: home, pillars, projects, calls for proposals, methodologies — The site the world sat next to: pillars, projects, calls, methodologies.

Ride it yourself

This is not a mockup. It is the live site, embedded — W to move, Shift for turbo, H for help. If your device prefers, open it full screen at 3d.laboratorio.gob.do.

It existed to break a mindset: to prove a public institution could make more than forms.

The live government site, embedded. Not a video, not a mockup.