Nearly 300 designers from around the world gathered in Taipei on Monday to attend the award ceremony for the Taiwan International Student Design Competition (台灣國際學生創意設計大賽), an annual event for young designers that seeks to draw global attention to local design.
But festival director Lin Pang-soong (林磐聳) is cautious about the competition’s rapid growth from a few hundred submissions when the Ministry of Education began the awards in 2008, to a large-scale international event that sees nearly 8,000 entries.
“While 58 percent of this year’s submissions were international entries, the majority of them came from China. It is a warning sign,” Lin says.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan International Student Design Competition
The large number of Chinese entries limits the event to being a regional competition, eclipsing the original aim to build a platform to connect Taiwanese design talent with the rest of the world.
GLOBAL DESIGN
That being said, organizers did form partnerships with international design organizations, including the Brno Biennale Association from the Czech Republic, the Korea Ensemble of Contemporary Design and the International Council of Design, one of the world’s leading organizations for design professionals.
The Global Talent Design Festival (全球青年設計大會), a series of forums and workshops, also saw local students work with top designers from countries such as Switzerland, Slovakia, Mexico, South Africa, Japan and India.
“It is essential to bring Taiwanese students to the world, and the world to Taiwan,” says Don Chen (陳文堂), CEO of iSee Taiwan Foundation (看見台灣基金會), which co-sponsored the festival.
AND THE WINNER IS ...
The competition, open to college and university students, was divided into three award categories — product design, visual design and digital animation.
Chinese student Shi Tian (石田) and his team won this year’s Grand Prix with Zhong Zhong’s Wonderland (開心的壹天), an animated short.
Shi, who studies at Communication University of China in Beijing, says the event helped him to understand the importance of global collaboration.
“People from different cultures think very differently. At the workshop, we discussed ideas and solutions that I could never come up with on my own,” Shi says.
Design students from China won big at the competition. Apart from Shi and his team, Chinese student Cheng Yi-fen (鄭禕芬) from Xiamen University took home the gold prize in the visual design category this year. The top honors in the product design and digital animation categories went to Japanese and American teams respectively.
“Chinese students have shown strong ambition and are very driven,” Lin says.
OPENING UP
However, Chu Cheok-son (朱焯信), chairman of the Macau Designers Association, says that Taiwan’s design scene has come a long way since he first came here 20 years ago, citing design education and openness to new ideas as key.
“People used to think that Taiwanese designed without much global thinking. But in the past few years, they have learned to express themselves more freely. It is a mental breakthrough, which is reflected in the work we see here,” Chu says.
Kittiratana Pitipanich from the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) agrees.
“Students in Thailand and Taiwan share certain similarities. They are both innovative when it comes to design, trying to turn traditional culture into something new,” Pitipanich says.
“Taiwanese students think in a very systematic, rational way. Thai students tend to be more emotional, less on the technical side,” he adds.
To be sure, festival organizers have firmly embraced the idea of becoming internationalized by bringing in the 10 international design organizations. Each institution has authorized and given its own award at the competition, while sending representatives to Taipei to discuss possibilities for further collaboration.
“With the support of international organizations, it is much easier for us to gain global acceptance… International exchanges and input can in turn have a positive influence on Taiwan’s design scene. This way, Taiwan won’t be marginalized,” Lin says.
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