Shenzhen design shines at design ‘Oscars’ award ceremony

TWENTY-FOUR works presented by Shenzhen design companies won this year’s iF Design Award. A delegation of local designers accepted the awards last week in Germany and participated in the Munich Creative Business Week (MCBW), an internationally renowned design event. 

Regarded as the design industry’s equivalent of the Oscars, the iF Design Award awards the world’s best designs. Nearly 2,000 participants from 51 countries submitted 4,352 works. Among 69 winning pieces by Chinese designers, 24 are from Shenzhen, accounting for 35 percent. 

Feng Changhong, secretary general of the Shenzhen Industrial Design Profession Association, said Shenzhen had its best ever year at the iF awards, which indicates the city’s reputation is improving among world-class professionals. 

Compared with global design giants Germany, Japan and South Korea, Shenzhen is in its infancy, Feng said. But many exciting new professional design organizations have sprung up in the city in the past 10 years. 

Local designers covering a variety of fields, such as consumer electronics, auto manufacturing and renewable energy, brought their creative works to the award ceremony, which has caught the attention of the international design community. 

Among the award-winning works are a multifunctional sensory light designed by Shenzhen CIGA Design, a sport digital video camera by Shenzhen Imay Design Co., a new-generation old-man mobile phone by Shenzhen NewPlan Design Co. and an intelligent keyboard by Shenzhen Rapoo Co. 

“The award is in recognition of the user-oriented design concept that our company has always pursued,” said Chen Qi, general manager of Imay Design. 

Chen said her company’s designers take account of users’ experiences to make their products more user-friendly. Its video camera is specifically designed for extreme sports enthusiasts and applied new concept and new technology. The camera is waterproof and can be installed on a car, a bike or a helmet. 

Chen said many Chinese designers are moving away from the traditional appearance-centered design approach to a user-oriented and practical approach. They said this was the reason for their success in the international competition. 

But Chen said the heyday of China’s industrial design is yet to come because it goes hand-in-hand with the manufacturing industry. 

“A majority of medium and small-sized Chinese manufacturers take design only as a way of gaining short-term competitiveness and they don’t have a mechanism that spurs innovation, which has directly hindered the development of the design industry,” she said. 

Zhang Jianmin with CIGA Design said design and manufacturing are inseparably interconnected with each other. “Industrial design promotes the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry,” Zhang said. “And only if the manufacturing improves its design ability, could China transform from a subcontracting factory to a manufacturer with its own brands.” 

Shenzhen has planned long-term cooperation with the iF Design Award’s organizing committee to continue boosting its design industry. The city will set up its own design award this year-the Hongshu Award. IF Award president Ralph Wiegmanm said his committee will help Shenzhen with the regulation and procedure design and oversee the award review process. 

The iF Award committee will also represent Munich to establish friendship with Shenzhen in May and will hold a three-year exhibition of the previous winners of the iF Award. In addition, a special exhibition of Shenzhen design works will be held in Hamburg for two weeks in October. 

1. Shenzhen designers at the iF Design Award Ceremony. 

2. Shenzhen designers and their German counterpart. 

3. A sport digital video camera by Shenzhen Imay Design Co.Ltd

4. A multifunctional sensory light by CIGA Design Co.Ltd

5. A new-generation old-man mobile phone by Shenzhen NewPlan Design Co.Ltd

Photos by courtesy of Shenzhen Industrial Design Profession Association