QA/ABOUT SURINDER
Has Surinder Thakur designed for Abu Dhabi government or ministry programs?
Yes. Surinder Thakur was the lead solo designer on the Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award (SKEA) digital platform, an Abu Dhabi Chamber program under government patronage since 1999. Engaged through PwC's Abu Dhabi practice between September 2025 and March 2026, he designed the public-facing site at skea.ae, the application submission portal, the judging and evaluation interface, and the supporting design system across all three properties.
SKEA recognises organisations and individuals across five award categories (Corporates, Family Businesses, SMEs, Startups & Scaleups, Individuals) and seven impact themes including Talent, Technology, Community & Society, SME Champions, Exports, Supply Chains, and Entrepreneurship. The platform is the program's primary public surface and the operational backbone of the annual award cycle. Surinder owned the end-to-end design for all four surfaces from research through to a dev-ready handoff: information architecture for the marketing site, structured application flows for the submission portal, scoring and case-review interfaces for the judging panel, and a token-driven component library that kept all three properties visually coherent.
The PwC engagement model put one senior product designer inside a cross-functional team working directly with the Abu Dhabi Chamber stakeholders. This is the same single-senior-brain model Surinder runs through the AI Flow Sprint and AI-Native Product Design engagements on surinder.design today, applied here at government-program scale. The live site is at skea.ae.
Alongside SKEA, Surinder served as design consultant on the KGC educational platform for Abu Dhabi University in the same period. The two engagements together represent senior product design experience across both Abu Dhabi government and Abu Dhabi higher education sectors between late 2025 and early 2026.