China’s design Oscars, the Red Star awards, just had their final judging in Beijing. The entries are at an all time high in both volume and breadth.

The Red Star finalists are picked from almost 7,000 entries. What is new this year is more international entries, like the Audi TT.

From toys, to tires, and trains, you are looking at the future of Chinese manufacturing, the final judging process of the Red Star Design Awards; judges are looking at aesthetics, functionality, and their marketplace appeal.

Starting this year, ecommerce giants Alibaba and JD would be promoting the winning products on their e-malls. All this is in aid of China’s supply side reforms.

“Innovation leads design development. In this way, it’s a positive; Red Star awards go towards helping our country’s innovation drive,” said Chen Dongliang, Executive Chairman of China Red Star Awards committee.

While international judges were impressed by the industrial entries, they were less taken with the consumer goods category.
 
”Very convincing for me was the medical equipment entries, communication products, which we saw are quite interesting. Takes quite some time to understand it. The infra red camera is excellent, never seen something like it before. Less convincing was the home living category,” said Severin Filek, Managing Director of Design Austria.

Furniture did not feature largely among the finalists, an industry association leader say we should do more to promote originals.

“For example, a furniture maker develops three-four sets of new products this spring, design, plus exhibition costs, that’s a few million yuan of costs, its success rate may be 50 percent, tops. You can see how much they put in, plus the time cost, opportunity cost. These manufacturers are decent. Those thieves cannot be tolerated,” said Chen Baoguang, Deputy Director of China Furniture Association Expert Committee.

One area where Chinese design may be leading is user interfaces.

“I think that in China there’s so much interaction in telephone design, and I imagine that that’s sort of the genesis and the basis of a lot of design that then comes into some of these different products,” said Orrin Shivley, Senior Director of Art and Design at Disney Interactive Media Group.

“And of course there are so many mobile users here, so many applications that in China they have a very good sense of what is good interaction design just because of volume of users. And again I think it starts from the phones, but we had glimpses into a few of the different UIs or UX experiences, and they’re great.”  

That is where the future of industrial design lies.

It’s less about the finishing and processing of materials, it’s more towards the direction of creating holistic user experiences. That’s why we also had to change our team somehow from a merely  a bunch of industrials designers to a more holistic team that allows us to address user interface design,” said Robert Sachon, Design Director, Bosch Appliances.