Student designers in China are invited to enter the CDN competition dedicated to identifying the most promising talent of the country's automotive future. The fifth annual Car Design Awards China are now open.
Briefs are being set by a range of OEMs - including VW, JAC and Qoros - and are published in full on the competition website. Others will be announced over the next few weeks, including one from UD Trucks, a Volvo brand which is entering the Chinese market.
The competition is open to full-time students studying a design discipline of any kind in China. A panel of distinguished senior designers, both domestic and international, will judge their entries. The closing date for submission is 10 January 2014.
The Awards will culminate in a glittering prize-giving ceremony held on the evening of 18 April 2014 at the CH-Auto studio in Beijing, just before the opening of Auto China 2014 (the Beijing motor show). The work of all the finalists will be on display at the Awards ceremony.
There will be winners in nine Awards categories. From them the judges will select one overall Student Design of the Year, who will win a fully-funded placement at CCS in Detroit in the summer of 2014.
League of success
Students from no fewer than 136 different design schools registered for the 2013 competition, whose results were announced at a ceremony held just prior to the Shanghai auto show this past April.
In fact CDN has been tracking the schools which have tutored the students with the best entries over the four years of this annual competition, and has created a league table of their success. The league rankings use a scoring system based on which students achieve shortlisted, finalist and winner status.
The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) tops the updated league, ahead of Tsinghua University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology. A strong showing by its students last year saw Jilin University moving up one place to fourth in the latest table, replacing Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, which dropped from fourth to sixth, and ahead of Jiangnan University, which dropped from equal fifth to eighth.
Some 44 schools have produced at least one student who has made a judges' shortlist over the past four years. See the full league table on the competition website.
In the same vein, the 2014 competition will again acknowledge and publicise the teachers and schools of the winning entrants, recognising that raw talent alone is not enough when seeking to become a professional designer of the future.
Car Design Awards China is sponsored by IAC and other leading suppliers to the industry and to the design community.
To find out more about the contest and to register please visit the competition website.
Related Articles:
Chinese site homepage
English version
2013 Car Design Awards China results
