Red Dot winners in Shanghai
BMW Brand Experience Center Photos: Courtesy of BMW
A forum held on December 4 at the Shanghai BMW Brand Experience Center welcomed a number of award-winning designers from different fields, including Jia Wei, Zhang Bohang, Magnus Aspegren and Nicholas Ott.
The forum, called Inspiration of Design, kicked off an exhibition at the center that will present a selection of winners of the Red Dot Design Awards. The awards were created in 1955 and are one of the top three design awards in the world. Red Dot is seen as the Oscar in industrial design, and is a great honor for designers.
The Red Dot competition attracts an average of more than 10,000 contestants each year to compete for the product design, communication design and design concept awards.
The exhibition features designer Zhang Bohang's landscape-inspired furniture design, a series of batteries that connect together like a chocolate bar designed by Jia Wei, and three BMW cars that won the 2013 Red Dot Award for product design.
"When you experience BMW, you see every design point has been thought of, when you touch a BMW car, you can feel it is a BMW, that's because BMW really understands the importance of design." said Aspegren, creative director of BMW Group DesignworksUSA, Shanghai Studios.
Jia, the founder of LKK Design, has won seven Red Dot Awards with his team. He said that winning the award is meaningful to him in three ways. The first is Chinese designers need professional acceptance in the international industry.
"It's like athletes wanting to win the championship in Olympic Games," he explained.
Second, the prizes are valuable for clients.
Third, and most important, is the fact that Chinese designers can achieve recognition at an international award ceremony. This has a value for the whole society.
Two of BMW's famous art cars have been included in the exhibit, and are grabbing a lot of attention.
One is a BMW 635CSi performance car, which was enhanced by artist Ernst Fuchs in 1982 with a much more sophisticated while cute look. The body of the car was painted with images of a rabbit running across the motorway and leaping over fires. It was an expression of "a wide range of experiences, fears, desires and invocations, as well as aesthetic, artistic freedom," according to Fuchs.
Another eye-catching exhibit was a twelve cylinder 380 bhp BMW created in 1999 with philosophical sentences written on its body. Messages like "Protect me from what I want" and "You are so complex you don't respond to danger" were a perfect representation of the personality of designer Jenny Holzer.
The exhibit doesn't simply have traditional signs beside the exhibits to help viewers understand what they are looking at. In addition, it provides a QR code system to allow visitors to access more information, and even see the process of how a design draft can turn into a final product.
The exhibit is taking place in a white pavilion, the BMW Brand Experience Center, designed by Nicholas Ott.
"BMW is very Germany, dynamic and sensible," said Jia.
Jia's impression is a response to BMW's design philosophy - "When it comes to design, the BMW Group has one pivotal aim in mind: to create emotionally charged products with lasting appeal."
The exhibit ends December 24.