Digital Twins Helpdesk

Running a digital twin of your city is not a software purchase. It needs sensors in the street, a data pipeline that survives them, enough compute to model something useful, protocols other cities can read, and people who know what to do with all of it. Most European cities have some of that. Almost none have all of it.

Atypisch worked under Serendipity, in a consortium with other large national and international partners, on a European Commission programme with one deliverable: give 150 European cities a complete digital roadmap, from where they stand today to the point where running a local digital twin is realistic. Together with a small team we built the toolbox that made that possible at scale.

A city representative works through a structured assessment covering sensor infrastructure, data processing, compute, protocols, governance and staffing. Every answer is scored. The scores become a report, the report becomes a roadmap, and the roadmap is handed over to the city digitally. Around that sits the machinery the consortium itself runs on: a CRM, a shared helpdesk connecting consortium members to each other and to city representatives, and insight dashboards showing where a city actually stands rather than where it says it stands.

We built the assessment flow in Next.js on a custom CMS on top of Payload, so the assessment can change without a release. We designed the whole product from scratch in Figma and implemented it as one design system. We also made the how-to videos and the guided onboarding, because the people filling this in are rarely the people who understand what a digital twin needs.

That last point turned out to be the real constraint. A city representative might be a data architect, or the one civil servant who also handles parking permits. The same assessment has to be answerable by both and still produce a score that means the same thing in both cases. That is a content and interaction problem before it is a technical one, and it is why the guidance is part of the product instead of a PDF next to it.