Our student competition goes from strength to strength
Over the last eight years our Car Design Awards China has found many outstanding new designers, many of whom have gone on to work in design studios in China and worldwide, helping to shape the industry for years to come.
The 2018 event, the awards ceremony of which has just taken place in Beijing, was a great success once again, and saw us receive an incredibly impressive 371 entries from 106 schools across China.
The event, presented by the incomparable Chris Bangle, attracted an impressive cross-section of the senior design community, plus, of course, a large cohort of nervous but excited design students.
BMW Designworks, Chang An, Geely Design, Hyundai, JAC, Nissan Group of China, & VW’s Future Center Asia set the briefs that inspired all the students’ designs, and a panel of highly distinguished judges had the extremely tricky task of picking out winners from a very high-quality field of entries.
The overall winners will travel to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, who are providing a special Cultural Immersion Workshop placement for them, which should be incredibly valuable in their future careers (and, as past winners can confirm, also extremely enlightening and enjoyable).
Of course, in classic F1 press conference style, we’d also like to thank our sponsors. Our premier sponsor for the awards was Magna Exteriors, and the others, in alphabetical order, were: Autodesk, BASF, Designworks, CH-Auto, Chang An, Dinamica, DJI, Geely, Hyundai, Icona, JAC, KWA, Nissan China, Pininfarina Shanghai, VW Future Centre Asia and Yanfeng. And we also owe major thanks to Bose for designing and producing the rather splendid (and impressively weighty) trophies.
All of the category winners’ work can be seen in the links on the right, but we’re delighted to announce that the Student Design of the Year award for 2018 was awarded to the very deserving team of Jiang Minghui and Zhu Guannan.
Their project was finally chosen as the overall winner after a very long and hard-fought debate between our judges, which says a great deal about the extremely high standard of all of our category winners’ work.
However, this team’s high standard of work finally won them the top award, which is a tribute both to their skills and to the tutoring excellence of the Guangdong University of Technology and the China University of Petroleum.
The Most Successful School award this year, though, went to Hunan University – the institution which entered the most finalists and winners in this year’s competition.
Huge congratulations to all of this year’s winners. We’re very much looking forward to the inevitable day when they’re all industry-leading Design Directors (and much too busy and important to take our calls).
