Designing a Self-guided Service for Rixing Type Foundry

Rixing is well known as the world’s last and only type foundry still making Traditional Chinese letterpress. To convey the cultural values of such disappearing industry heritage - letterpressing, Rixing devotes to offering guided tours to every visitor. However, the guide quality varied from staff to staff, making the visitor experience inconsistent. Also, it takes an average of 27 minutes for a comprehensive guide for each visitor, which is time-consuming, labor-intense, and gradually becomes a financial burden for Rixing. To resolve the crisis, we’ve introduced a self-guided service to free human labor and enhance visitor experience.



The project is about transforming Rixing into a visitor-centric experiential destination. Value propositioning, stakeholder interviews, and design workshops were conducted, and customer experience journey mapping is used to summarize an optimal and comprehensive guided tour experience from the visitor's perspective. Based on the research insights gained, points of interests are identified and made inter-connected to be experienced systematically, whilst providing the visitors with options to experience different points of interests freely. A self-guided service framework is then implemented as a mobile guide so that the visitor can learn about the place, artefacts, and letterpress-related knowledge, and shop commodities throughout the self-guided journey.