The iF Design Awards Land In Chengdu

China's Cultural and Creative Industry Center Seeks Global Development

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2016 Chengdu Creativity & Design Week

Nov 29, 2016, 08:00 ET

CHENGDU, China, Nov. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The iF Design Awards in Germany, one of the most prestigious global design awards around the world, made its debut during Chengdu Creativity & Design Week 2016 from November 25 - 27. More than 700 award-winning products from 2016 were on display to the public in Chengdu, a western city of China. It is the first time that iF Award-winning products have been exhibited abroad.

Chengdu, one of the Top Six National Central Cities in China, is the only one crowned as the Cultural and Creative Industry Center. By holding Creativity & Design Week, Chengdu brings in international resources and facilitates international cooperation. It aims to grow into a center city for world-class creative and design industries to exhibit, communicate and trade, where local designers can find an international creative and design platform, and where the world's leading design institutions can find plenty of reasons to come.

Chengdu Creativity & Design Week (CCDW), established in 2014, is now one of the most renowned events in western and central China. This year, CCDW consisted of the 2016 Gold Panda Culture Creativity Design Awards, The 3rd Chengdu Creativity & Design Industry Expo, The Forum on International Culture Industries Chengdu Summit, China 2016, the 2016 Chengdu College Student Creative Design Competition, Dual-100 Cultural Tourism Creative Activities and an E-sports Competition.

At the 3rd Chengdu Creativity & Design Industry Expo, three iF Award-winning products caught a lot of attention. They were the ThinkPad X1 Tablet, to which users could add functions depending on their needs; the HIDEOUT Lounge Chair made by steam bending technology, and the Black & Gray & Silber Scissors, which are simple and practical.

The cooperation between iF and CCDW has covered more areas. The iF Design Awards judges, together with a lot of esteemed international and domestic experts, served as judges for the 2016 Gold Panda Culture Creativity Design Awards. They were Paul Cohen, one of the founders of Cube Design Australia; HIRO TANAKA, world-renowned designer and winner of the Red Dot Design Award for best designer in Germany; Guangmin Zhang, regional adviser for ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design); Xiaobo Lu, Dean of Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts and judge for the Red Dot Award; Bochu Xu, Dean of the Rail and Transportation College of Southwest Jiaotong University and expert in the field of rail transportation and bridges, and several others. At the 2016 Gold Panda Culture Creativity Design Awards, 159 awards in 9 categories and 5 special awards were selected.

The Gold Panda Award is one of the highest awards for creative design in China, with a prize of RMB 1 million. The 12 prize-winning products from this year's Gold Panda Awards will attend the competition for the 2017 iF Design Awards in Germany.

At present, iF International Forum Design, founders and organizer of the iF Product Design Awards, is discussing the possibility of further engagement in areas such as exhibitions, forums, counseling and training with the Chengdu government. The evaluation process on iF landing in Chengdu is under way.

Ralph Wiegmann, CEO of iF International Forum Design, visited such cultural and creative design Industry sites as Chengdu Planning Exhibition Hall, Thinkzone International, and Eastern Suburb Memory from November 3 - 4. He highly commended Chengdu for its splendid, long history, reasonable city planning, and favorable environment for the cultural and creative design industries. "Such an environment can inspire the creativity of entrepreneurs, and Chengdu is an ideal place for iF to land," he said.

At CCDW 2016's opening ceremony on November 25th, the Chengdu government and Cambridge Funds Investment Co., Ltd (Cambridge Funds) reached a cooperative consensus that out of its first batch of investment towards China (totaling RMB 3 billion), RMB 450 million will be set aside to invest in Chengdu's cultural and creative design industries. Cambridge Funds completed its first investment, RMB 300,000 for stone craft designed by Jiayong Luo, a 24-year-old man from Chongzhou, Chengdu, at the 3rd Chengdu Creativity & Design Industry Expo, which was a core part of CCDW 2016.