If somebody handed you a pencil and asked you to improve your city, would you draw a building? A bus stop? A bin that people actually want to use? Shenzhen’s UNESCO Creative City profile describes designers working across graphic design, fashion, toys, jewellery and the objects people use every day. Design here is broader than making a phone look shiny.
This competition has real results
The Shenzhen Design Award for Young Talents, often shortened to SDAY, began in 2013. Its organiser describes a programme for designers under thirty-five, including professionals, teams and design students connected with creative cities. That age limit makes the word young more precise than an advertisement simply promising to celebrate fresh ideas.
The 2025 ceremony provides an actual example of how recognition was divided. Shenzhen’s government report, published on 30 October, records twenty-one SDAY winners: one grand award, ten professional merit awards and ten student new-star awards. The ceremony had taken place the previous day.
Those separate categories matter. A student’s submitted work and an established professional’s portfolio are not automatically the same kind of evidence. The programme makes space for both without pretending every entrant arrives with identical experience.
The report also covers another competition, the Kunpeng Global Design Award. It would be easy to borrow an eye-catching winner from that list and call it an SDAY project, but they are distinct awards. Keeping the names attached to the right results helps a reader follow what actually happened.
A prize is a starting point for looking at design, rather than proof that a product has been manufactured or succeeds in every situation. The real competition gives promising work a platform; the next questions concern the work itself, its users and what happens after judging.
A good idea still has to work
A competition gives designers a brief: the problem they are trying to answer and the conditions their answer must meet. Shenzhen’s profile links the young-talent award to quality of life and sustainability. Those aims ask a designer to think about consequences as well as appearance.
Consider a bus-stop sign as a design exercise. A beautiful map is little help if the names are too small to read from where a passenger stands. A clear map may still fail if it leaves out the information someone needs to choose a direction. The designer has to decide what matters at that moment and how the user will find it.
Different passengers also bring different needs. Somebody who knows the route wants a quick confirmation; a newcomer may need more explanation. A person holding shopping cannot necessarily unfold a large leaflet or search a tiny screen. These are practical questions a design can be tested against, not reasons to decorate it more heavily.
A prototype makes that testing possible. It might be a paper sign, a rough model or a simple screen showing the proposed information. Letting someone try it can expose a problem that a polished drawing hid. A misunderstanding is useful evidence while the idea is still easy to change.
Environmental aims introduce another set of choices. A replaceable part could keep an object in use when a small component breaks. Using less material might be helpful, but only if the object still performs its job. A claim about sustainability needs to consider use and maintenance, rather than stopping at the colour green.
An award cannot settle every question about a design’s real life. Judges see the submitted work under a particular set of rules; users encounter it in everyday circumstances. The competition can recognise a promising solution without proving that it will work equally well in every street or home.
For a young designer, that is encouraging. You do not have to begin with a spectacular skyline. Start with a repeated inconvenience, describe who experiences it and make an idea someone can actually try. The most persuasive drawing may be the one that changes after a user points out something you missed.
That is how a city can become a design brief: a collection of everyday situations worth understanding closely.
Take a toy as an example. Its shape might invite you to pick it up, but the material, weight and packaging affect what happens next. A designer has to think past the first glance. The award described by UNESCO puts that wider sort of thinking on the table.
The city’s profile also describes the Shenzhen Design Award for Young Talents, aimed at designers under 35 and focused on the quality of life and sustainability. That is an interesting way to think about a competition: the winning question is not simply “Does it look cool?” but “What changes for the person using it?” The programme’s 2025 results give that ambition a documented competition year, rather than leaving it as a future proposal.
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Sources
- UNESCO Creative Cities Network: Shenzhen profile
- Shenzhen City of Design Promotion Association: Shenzhen Design Award for Young Talents programme
- Shenzhen Municipal Government: 2025 Shenzhen design awards report, 30 October 2025