Dutch pavilion world exhibition Osaka 2025

Visitor Journey / Interactive Installations / Partners: Tellart | Rauw |

Key Takeaways

lijstje van dingen

An immersive journey through the Netherlands’ evolving relationship with water

At Expo 2025 Osaka, we designed the experience for the Netherlands Pavilion while at Tellart, in collaboration with RAU Architects, DGMR and Asanuma. We developed the winning proposal until detailed design for an immersive visitor journey that translates Common Ground, the Dutch mindset of solving complex challenges together, into a spatial and interactive experience.

Commissioned by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), the pavilion builds on a distinctly Dutch reality: living below sea level. Centuries of working together against water shaped a culture of collaboration, ingenuity and long-term thinking. We translated this mentality into a narrative that evolves from our historic relationship with water towards a future where global challenges, from climate change to the energy transition, can only be solved together.

At the heart of the pavilion stands a monumental sphere symbolising A New Dawn, a future powered by clean energy and collective action. Echoing this architectural centrepiece, we introduced a personal interactive orb that guides visitors through the pavilion, activates installations and connects every experience into one continuous storyline.

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Visualising collaboration with water

We opened the visitor journey by introducing the mindset behind Common Ground. Rather than telling visitors about Dutch water history, we invited them to experience it. A resonating water basin shows ripples moving and splashing the water chaotically, but slowly changing in a state of aligned frequencies resonating in harmony.

The installation symbolises how cooperation turned an unpredictable force into the foundation of Dutch society, and how collaboration remains essential for solving today’s global challenges.

Personal token

We designed the personal orb as a guiding interaction system throughout the pavilion, activating installations and shaping a personalised visitor journey. The object therefore transforms into a narrative and spatial device, connecting four different experience zones into one continuous storyline.

©Tellart 2025

Can You Design a Host?

An immersive experience is only as strong as the people bringing it to life. While we designed the spaces, interactions and narrative, it is the pavilion hosts who ultimately shape how visitors experience them. Designing for hosts therefore became as important as designing for visitors.

The challenge they solved was to provide enough narrative structure to ensure a consistent story, while leaving enough freedom to make it their own. Authenticity cannot be scripted. By trusting hosts to interpret the narrative in their own way, every interaction became more natural, engaging and credible. Designing the experience also means learning where to let go of control.

360° immersive dome connects strangers

The narrative culminates beneath a 360° immersive dome, where an AI-assisted cinematic experience imagines speculative futures powered by water, renewable energy and international collaboration. The experience shifts the story from Dutch history to a shared global future.

Connecting innovation to society

We translated the pavilion’s vision into tangible innovations through interactive exhibits presenting Dutch expertise in renewable energy, water technology, mobility and circular systems. These installations bridge visionary storytelling with practical solutions.

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Making every visitor part of the story

The final installation is designed as a collective feedback system. Every visitor contributes to a continuously evolving visual composition, reinforcing the pavilion’s central message: meaningful change begins when individual actions become collective momentum.

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Inspiring the next generation

We developed a dedicated children’s experience featuring Miffy, the Netherlands’ most iconic children’s character. Through age-appropriate storytelling, younger visitors explore the themes of pavilion in wall mounted book resembling the famous Miffy books.

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Where Does the Experience End?

While developing the children’s visitor journey around Miffy, we realised her storytelling potential extended far beyond the exhibition itself. Rather than treating the shop as a separate commercial space, we saw it as the final chapter of the visitor experience. After all, a memorable experience doesn’t end at the exit, it lives on through the objects people take home.

Not knowing if this would work we designed an exclusive Miffy collectible that translated the pavilion’s narrative into a tangible keepsake. The doll was well received and has since become one of the most sought-after collector’s items from Expo 2025 in Japan, demonstrating how thoughtful merchandise can become an integral part of the overall guest experience rather than an afterthought.

Who Designs for the Designers?

One of our biggest lessons emerged outside the visitor journey. Many operational challenges, from crowd flow and maintenance to keeping up kitchen stock and daily logistics, could have been prevented, or at least streamlined, through design decisions made much earlier in the process.

This taught us that facility management should be involved from the tender phase onwards. Experience design is not only about designing for visitors, but also for the people who make the experience possible. By considering their workflows from the beginning, countless small operational issues can be eliminated before the doors even open.

We love the hands-on research work done in the pavilion by Marie-Sophie Martens. Her thesis is interesting to read on this topic: “Designing Expo Pavilions for Operational Efficiency: Spatial Requirements to support Facility Management”