Reliance Communications is one of India’s largest telecommunication providers with over 40 million subscribers. They are also credited with revolutionising the telecom industry by bringing best-in-class technology, operations and making telecom, as a service, accessible to all.

The NNOC (national network operations center) occupies a pride of place within the corporate headquarters of Reliance located at the outskirts of Mumbai. It also doubles up as an exhibition space that gives visitors a window into the company’s infrastructure, operations, services and products.

The Reliance brand team approached Quicksand with a brief to re-vision the space as an immersive & interactive experience communicating the key products, services and values of the group. What follows is the process we undertook and some pertinent design outputs. The end output from Quicksand was an experience blueprint that established the intended user experience & enablers for it.

DESIGN RESEARCH

Detailed one-on-one sessions with all business heads within Reliance helped the design team establish the guiding vision that exists within the group. It also gave early pointers to the scale, complexity and magnitude that needed to be represented within the NNOC. We also spent several days at the NNOC, experiencing it as visitors, architects and designers.

All interview transcriptions were compiled and archived for internal reference (click image below for enhanced view)

DESIGN VISIONING

Synthesis of these interviews led to the initial design vision and an expectations summary that was necessary to establish internal buy-in. These were a mix of evocative visuals and written content that summarized what internal expectations were and how they all came together under a unifying vision for Reliance.

DESIGN BLUEPRINTING

The design & experience blueprint developed on the basis of above research, involved studying the floor plans of the NNOC and a massive content hunt for

• products & services of Reliance Communications including technical specifications
• building a technology glossary of the latest interactive technologies from around the world that could be brought into the space
• benchmarking against operation centers of other global majors in telecom

The final output consisted of a virtual walk-through of the space conceived as 9 distinct zones – each zone with a set of installations that communicated the past, present and future of Reliance. Click below to preview parts of the film and the print document presented to Reliance.

(the video below is confidential. please get in touch for more details)

The concept was presented internally to the Chairperson, Mr. Anil Ambani and given to Accenture for a technology feasibility study. Further developments are awaited.