Explaining Plant Dyeing to Visitors: Baolai's Outdoor Knowledge Display Design

Challenge

The Baolai Cultural Association has long used plant-dyeing craft to promote local culture, but that knowledge was mostly passed on through live teaching. Without an instructor on site, visitors had no way to understand the full process, from gathering materials to mordanting, dyeing, and finishing. Plant dyeing involves many steps and technical terms, and simply printing that text onto outdoor panels risked producing something stiff and hard to read. The challenge was fitting real craft knowledge into a limited format that stayed clear and still felt warm.

Goal

Build an outdoor knowledge display system for a walking route through Baolai that breaks the complex dyeing process into short, memorable sections, using a visual language drawn from plant dyeing itself, so visitors can follow the full story of the craft on their own, even with no guide present.

Approach

1. Replaced the standard rectangular panel with organic, leaf- and fruit-like curved forms, so each display looks as though it grew out of the plant-dyeing process itself.
2. Broke the content into sections including 'What Is Plant Dyeing', 'Taiwan's Color Treasury', '5 Steps to the Secret of Dyeing', 'Patterns of Magic', and 'Finishing and Care', paired with real photographs of dye materials and process shots to lower the barrier to reading.
3. Built a color reference system around dye materials common in Taiwan, such as yam tuber, sappanwood, onion skin, and betel nut husk, so visitors can match colors on the panels to the actual plants around them.

Outcome

A complete set of outdoor plant-dyeing knowledge panels covering what plant dyeing is, Taiwan's color treasury, the five steps of dyeing, patterning techniques, and finishing and care. The Baolai Cultural Association now has a permanent display that visitors can read without a guide present, letting anyone walking through Baolai understand its plant-dyeing story.