Urban Design Research Institute
The Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) is a Mumbai-based non-profit organisation at the forefront of urban planning advocacy, architectural research, and public policy engagement — working to shape the future of India's cities. Matscop Technical was commissioned to design and develop a comprehensive website to serve as the central hub for UDRI's publications, projects, events, and public engagement initiatives. The design required a balance of institutional gravitas and accessible communication.
Services Delivered
Organising Complexity Without Losing Clarity
UDRI's work spans decades of publications, large-scale research projects, public events, policy submissions, and community programmes. Organising this breadth of content into a single, navigable website — without overwhelming visitors — was the central design challenge.
The website needed to serve multiple distinct audiences simultaneously: architects and urban planners looking for research, policy-makers seeking evidence-based advocacy, journalists searching for spokespersons, and the general public interested in Mumbai's built environment. Every page had to work for all of them.
What We Delivered
Information Architecture & UX Design
We began with a thorough content audit and stakeholder workshops to map UDRI's full content ecosystem. From this, we designed a clear information architecture that organised decades of research, events, and publications into logical, discoverable categories. Every user flow was wireframed and validated before visual design began, ensuring that a first-time visitor could find exactly what they needed within seconds of landing on the site.
Visual Design
The visual design balances institutional authority with warm, open communication — reflecting UDRI's role as a bridge between academic research and public discourse. We developed a clean typographic system, a restrained colour palette anchored in Mumbai's urban landscape, and a flexible grid that accommodates both long-form editorial content and photography-led feature pages. The design scales elegantly from desktop to mobile.
CMS Development
We built the website on a robust CMS platform enabling UDRI's team to independently manage publications, add new projects, update events, and publish news without technical support. The back-end includes a structured publications library with filtering by year, category and author, an event management system, and a media archive. All content is structured for strong search engine indexing from day one.
Key Results
Publications, projects, and events organised in the new CMS at launch
Distinct audience segments effectively served by a single website
Team self-sufficiency — no developer required for ongoing content updates
Search ranking for key urban planning research terms in India within 6 months
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