Issues #08 and #09 examined the Taichung Green Museumbrary through strategy and methodology; #10 went deeper on the engineering side. But between strategy and engineering sits another layer — the one visitors actually touch. The digital interface itself. In this issue, we sit down with visual designer Lynn and creative planner Ida to talk about how the design of this project came to be.

The first time Lynn visited the Green Museumbrary, what struck her most was that the space itself invited exploration. "You'd come across these unexpected spaces. It reminded me of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa — I once walked into a room there and looked up to find a circular opening cut directly into the sky. The space pulls you in. It triggers curiosity, the urge to look further."

"My first thought was — architects get to be so free," Ida says. In the volumes of the building, she saw atypical decisions everywhere: a large circular fire stair, constantly shifting spatial scales, a museum lobby that turns the act of visiting into something closer to a climb. "You really feel them being unapologetic, refusing to compromise on the values and aesthetics they believe in. It's wonderful."

Working with SANAA left its own impression. Lynn noticed a particular composure in the way they held themselves between competing pressures — a kind of grace in the middle of contradiction. "Reconciling ideals with what can actually be built must be exhausting. But they meet that work with energy. They seem to genuinely enjoy it."

And ULTRACOMBOS? Lynn paused. "We're another kind of extreme. Every step solid, every detail revisited again and again. We tend to lean into the hard parts. It would be wonderful if, one day, we could distill that same composure ourselves."

How do you translate SANAA's architectural vocabulary — transparency, flow, lightness — into a visual language? This was the first question the visual design had to answer. Lynn breaks her answer into three layers.

First, translating material and proportion. The angle of a rounded corner, the texture of aluminum, the expanded metal mesh, the breathing rhythm of flow. Lynn describes the process as "collecting, bit by bit, on site." The graphics, the puzzle ciphers, the level designs — all of it came from things she encountered there.

Second, color.

"White actually carries more weight than gray," Lynn says. The visual system contains almost no large blocks of black; nearly everything is built from gradations of gray and white. After many rounds of testing, the lightness and flow of the final version feel like a different temperament entirely from the original proposal.

Third, a shift in working method.

Even when you know exactly what you're going for, doubt still creeps in once the work is done. During soft launch, Lynn brought her phone into the Green Museumbrary and used the media guide as a regular visitor would. "It turned out so much better than I'd imagined. I didn't need to second-guess myself. Because the feeling only becomes complete when you actually use these things — on a phone, in the space."

Media Guide: a mobile guide offering themed routes — Architecture Walk, Library Tour, Exhibition Tour — using image, text, and audio to help visitors navigate the building.

Usually we think of interfaces as something to be seen: beautiful, useful, memorable. This time, it was almost the reverse.

As Lynn put it: imagine the digital experience as part of the building itself. The push displays sit in the space; phones are something every visitor naturally picks up. These things should exist the way a fire hydrant does — there when you need it, otherwise unnoticed.

But blending in carries a cost. "I worried that if it integrates too well, it becomes invisible — like there's nothing there at all."

Digital as a kind of skin: the goal is to merge into the space without quite disappearing. That contradiction sits at the center of this project's design.

Digital Signage System: in-venue screens that cycle through program information. ULTRACOMBOS designed the layout and motion using a grid system, allowing information to flow into the architectural space rather than sit on top of it.

We're not alone in thinking this way. The Whitney has written something similar: what draws visitors in is the art, the building, the social experience itself; technology's task is simply to connect them with the content, frictionlessly. (source)

The idea echoes a sentiment from SANAA: a building isn't finished when it's built. It's only complete once people are actually moving through it — pausing, looking, staying.

Since 2021 Digiwave, clue-based explorationgames have been a recurring tool at ULTRACOMBOS. Across projects, we've watched visitors become more invested than we'd expected. But the Green Museumbrary offered a context unlike anything we'd worked with before.

"The Green Museumbrary is a space built to hold possibility — full of intentional emptiness," Ida says. "The user experience should probably mirror that: open enough to hold different behaviors, different reasons for being there. And that's where it gets difficult. How do you design a single journey that can absorb such a wide range of motivations?"

Wanderer: a digital clue-based exploration game with levels scattered throughout the venue, turning the building's circulation, light, and spatial details into clues.

The levels were inspired by the building itself — and by everyday life.

Lynn brings up the Korok seeds (Yahaha) in The Legend of Zelda: a circle of stones with one piece missing — find it, fit it back in, and a small spirit appears. It has no real function. You just collect them. There are 900 in the game. "In Zelda, Link carries a Sheikah Slate as he explores," Lynn says. "That's exactly like the phone in everyone's hand here." She adds: "When I was at the Green Museumbrary last weekend, I actually saw someone shout Yahaha! at one of the donut benches that's missing a piece."

For Ida, the seeds came from a different image: "What I had in mind, at the very beginning, was walking into a forest and picking up beautiful seeds and stones. You put them in a box, you shake it, and the seeds knock against each other and make a sound." She continues: "Experience, at its core, is just something that already exists in life. Digital can transform it, open up a new view of it — but it doesn't leave the real world behind."

The Green Museumbrary is enormous. How does wandering actually happen — and is it incompatible with the logic of a game?

For Ida, the ideal spirit of Wanderer is the chance encounter: no completion badges needed to keep people moving. But Lynn, who plays games herself, pointed out that playing one does seem to require, at minimum, knowing how many levels exist — you need a basic sense of progress. So Wanderer ended up neither/both. A spectrum that holds different ways of being there: players intent on solving the game can follow the level cues; visitors who came for the books or the exhibitions can stumble into a level by accident; and the true wanderers just pick up what they happen to find.

The map went through more revisions than anything else in Wanderer. The turning point, Lynn says, came from a realization: "We didn't actually need to tell people where they were. The whole experience should feel like exploration — like it's safe to get lost — while making the game itself more interactive." To pull this off, we made a slightly reckless call: in the final two weeks, we rebuilt the map as a 3D exploration view.

Watching the final map come together, Ida saw the same principle echoed elsewhere: "It's the same problem the visual side was solving — the more the digital recedes, the more the physical stands out. A simpler interface keeps the experience anchored in the actual building, while still layering a sense of gameplay on top of reality." Perhaps that's what digital, used this way, does: it pushes attention back into physical space.

The hardest is the Treehouse. There's also a mysterious Light level — night-time only. Lynn's favorite is Chance Encounter: "Because I like being recommended books."

Very few people have completed any of them so far. The rest, you'll have to find on site.

Photo Courtesy of YHLAA & ULTRACOMBOS

Text by: ULTRACOMBOS Editorial Team & claude.ai

Key Visual: 白色的熊

This article was translated by AI and reviewed by human editors.