Round Island Taiwan

“Where there is a road, there is a story.”
Highways are conventionally framed as neutral infrastructure: technical systems designed to optimize mobility and efficiency. Yet, in Taiwan, highways function simultaneously as cultural arteries, shaping how people encounter landscapes, communities, and collective memory. The question, then, is not only how infrastructure moves vehicles, but also how it mediates cultural experience.
Round Island Taiwan addresses this provocation by reframing the highway as both an interface and a probe: an interface that connects travelers with local narratives, and a probe that uncovers cultural and ecological layers often overlooked in transit. This conceptual shift expands the role of infrastructure from logistical support to cultural mediation.
The design intervention operationalizes this perspective through service design thinking. A curated stamp journey spans 22 counties and 44 stations, each featuring a unique stamp design derived from local history and identity. Participation is scaffolded by a simple ritual: collecting stamps, that transforms linear travel into a narrative accumulation of stories and encounters. The journey culminates at the Taiwan Highway Museum, where a personalized certificate is awarded. Beyond a token of accomplishment, the certificate and accompanying souvenirs (bicycle plates, travel badges) extend the cultural meaning of the highway into everyday life, embedding memory into material form.
The project thus demonstrates how design can rebrand infrastructure into cultural infrastructure. By layering narrative, ritual, and tangible artifacts onto an existing system, the highway is repositioned as a platform of identity, belonging, and cultural continuity. This opens a broader implication: that the future governance and sustainable iteration of infrastructure should not be reduced to engineering maintenance alone, but also incorporate cultural stewardship.
In this sense, Round Island Taiwan is not merely a tourism campaign. It is a design-led inquiry into how infrastructure can be reimagined as a cultural ecosystem, where every road is more than a conduit of traffic, but a living archive of stories waiting to be encountered, shared, and sustained.