A Bang & Olufsen Beogmaster 1900 music speaker; a Gaggenau EB900 stove, winner of the Red Dot Design Award (one of the three most recognized awards in industrial design, together with the iF Design Award and IDEA Award) in 1993; and the Toshiba REGZA WL768 LCD TV, which won an iF Product Design Award in 2011.

These are just some of the industrial designs created by the Jacob Jensen Design company, which was founded in 1958 in Denmark. And now all of these designs can be seen in Shanghai at the newly created Jacob Jensen Design studio which opened last week in the Cultural Creative Industry Clustering (CCIC) at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts (SIVA) in Songjiang district.

Industry leaders

This new studio has been designed and decorated to match the company's headquarters in Denmark.

"Here is where the real magic happens," said Marijn Beije, the creative director of the studio, where every designer has a desk for modeling and drawing, and a separate computer desk. "We do the thinking and sketching in the morning, and in the afternoon we build a 1:1 model," said Beije.

According to Beije, a model can sometimes go through up to 70 significant adjustments before it is completed to the designer's satisfaction. 

And this September, 10 students recruited from China will become apprentices to Timothy Jacob Jensen, the current CEO and chief designer of the company which was established by his father Jacob Jensen.

Jacob Jensen junior's designs have been collected by a range of world-famous institutions such as the International Design Museum in Munich and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A practical education

The operation at the Jacob Jensen Design studio in Shanghai will differ from other institutes in the country, which usually cater to college students and mainly focus on lectures, while lacking hands-on practical experience. Jacob Jensen Design's apprentices have graduated from college and will already have some work experience in the field of industrial design.

The students will work alongside Jenson and his experienced design team, and will be a part of every project from start to finish.

"Usually after graduation people go through long periods where they end up doing jobs simply to make a living, and that are far removed from what they really want to do," said Xia Jun, CEO of the DeTao Group in Beijing, which is behind the CCIC project alongside SIVA and helps to facilitate projects in a variety of creative industries. "I think what can help the graduates or career freshmen grow more quickly is to work with world-class experts in their respective field and learn from them."

The DeTao group started planning the DeTao Master Heritures (DMH) program six years ago, which aims to introduce international experts in various fields - especially the creative industries - to China. CCIC became the first China base to implement the DMH program.

Jensen also expressed his hopes for the Shanghai studio: "I think I can help Chinese designers gain more self-confidence and I think I can help them develop their own Chinese style, and to give them the experience of living and working in an international creative environment, which I think is slightly different from traditional Chinese design agencies."

Studio creatives

Besides Jensen, CCIC will also welcome another seven international design experts, who will each launch their own studios this September. Acording to Xia, in all, more than 100 experts have signed contracts with DeTao, and some 60 studios will be set up at CCIC alone.

For example, a master's course in strategic design will be launched by Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of Frogdesign, who has worked for such world-renowned brands as Louis Vitton, Olympus and Sony and who created the Snow White design language used by Apple Computer from 1984 to 1990.

Mathis Heller, winner of both the Red Dot Design Award and an iF Design Award in 2011, and whose clients include BMW, Ford, Siemens Mobile and Unilever, will recruit up to 12 students for his master's course in visionary design studies, centering on sustainable products and green mobility.

In the field of the performance arts, Roger S. Christiansen, who has directed episodes of Friends, Hanah Montana, and Icarly, will launch a master's course in film creation and film direction practice. Meanwhile, Michael Yamashita, a celebrated photographer for National Geographic Magazine, will head up a master's course in humanities documentary photography.

A number pavilion designers for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, such as Haim Dotan (Israel National Pavilion), Tina Hart and Kim Jarrett (roof garden at the New Zealand National Pavilion), and Yuraka Hikosaka (Japan National Pavilion), will all conduct courses at their own studios in Songjiang district.

"It's a very brave move and a great opportunity for the DeTao Group to establish these master's programs in China," Zhu Tao, president of the China Industrial Design Association, commented on the CCIC program. "We should conduct more close cooperation on the international level during the process of industrial transformation from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China.'"