ENERGYM

TAIPOWER D/S ONE is Taiwan's first exhibition centre built around green energy. The letters come from Distribution and Substation, which is literally what the building does, and were reread as Design and Sustainability. Our studio was responsible for the second floor.

The concept that won it was Energy plus Gym. A visitor collects a wristband, registers a personal energy symbol at a check-in station, then earns power the hard way: bouncing for hydro, dancing for wind, shooting hoops for solar, hauling battle ropes for wave, spinning for geothermal. Everything they generate accumulates on the band and is spent in a shared immersive finale.

It opened in 2019 as a permanent exhibition, after an eighteen-month build, under a five-year maintenance commitment held by the studio. That condition shaped the design work: nothing could be precious, and the visual system had to stay legible and reproducible for years without a designer in the building.

It is still open.

Before any single exhibit had a screen, the floor needed a language. I designed the identity system for the whole floor: an icon for each renewable source, a colour ramp to go with it, and the rules for how the two behave together.

Marine, wind, luminous, water, geothermal and bio. Each gets a mark drawn at a single stroke weight, a bilingual name, and four to five steps of colour specified down to print values. Every zone runs on it, including the exhibits I did not design myself, which is the entire point of building a system rather than a set of screens.

Documenting it this way was not ceremony. The project ran under a five-year maintenance commitment, so anyone reprinting or extending it years later has to match what is already on the wall without asking us.

The piece I am most attached to is the least athletic one. The Energy Observation Station pulls live generation figures from Taipower's working wind, solar and hydro plants and renders them as one continuous wave across six transparent screens, with physical models and driven mechanisms visible behind the glass.

Designing for transparent screens is its own discipline. The image is lit from behind by a real object, seen from an angle you do not control, in a room with its own lighting. Contrast behaves differently, colour behaves differently, and every composition has to survive whatever is physically sitting behind it.

Touch stations carry the reference material behind the exhibition: plant distribution, generation by year, the split between Taipower's own output and independent producers. Every screen is Chinese and English at once, not toggled, because domestic school groups and international visitors arrive on the same afternoon.

Data design for a state utility has a particular difficulty. The numbers have to be accurate enough to pass Taipower's review and simple enough for a twelve-year-old, in the same layout, with no second version for either audience.

Each visitor registers a personal energy symbol at check-in. It travels on the wristband and is recognised by every station in the room. The icon set and the colour system behind it were written up as standalone specifications, so the exhibition could be maintained, extended and repaired across five years without the original team.

Five energy types, five ways to sweat, and a finale where the whole room spends what it earned.