SAIC Design Challenge Winners Announced

On October 25th this year, the sixth ‘SAIC DESIGN CHALLENGE’ award closing ceremony was held at the SAIC Design Center in Shanghai, China. As part of the global competitions highlight 30 final concepts were selected to be made into physical mock ups. The ceremony exhibited an array of innovative ideas of students from top design colleges across the globe and celebrated some of the brightest future talent within the industry.

The theme for this year’s competition was ‘Born Electric’. Candidates were asked to choose between designing an EV platform based luxury vehicle as the new flagship for the Roewe brand in 2025, or a high performance electric vehicle for the MG brand in 2025,based on their interpretation of future automotive design trends.

Jointly launched at Coventry University, United Kingdom and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, on the 24^th of March, the SAIC Design Challenge received more than 400 submissions from over 100 prestigious universities and design institutes from across the world. The judging panel for the competition was composed of SAIC Design professional designers and a respected group of industry experts. Together they selected 30 students to progress through to the final stage of the competition, held in the SAIC Design Studio, Shanghai, where their design concepts were turned into fully detailed scale models.

There were four categories that were being judged across two regions, Europe and China; European Overall Winner, Excellence Award Winner and the Overall Entry Award Winner. As well as receiving their award the top three winners from each category were given the opportunity to undertake a work placement within one of the SAIC Design Studios, shadowing our company experts. What’s more, all of the finalists have also been given hiring priority by SAIC Design.

Trym Abrahamsen from Strate Ecole de Design in France was awarded the winner in the European entry category. Mahesh Nagarkar and Orhan Celal Gok were awarded second and third places respectively, both of whom studied at Coventry University.

SAIC European Advanced Design Director, Carl Gotham, said,“The SAIC Design Challenge provides students with the opportunity to get an insight into how an automotive design studio operates, and from our point of view, it’s great to get the innovative perspective of the next generation of designers from some of the world’s most prestigious design schools. The engagement with our competition has grown this year and it has been fantastic to see such creativity and enthusiasm for our brands from across many nationalities. We will continue to build on its success in future years in order to continue to provide opportunities for designers studying across Europe.”

European award winner Trym, commented, “The SAIC design challenge has been a game changer for me. The opportunity to be part of a studio environment over the course of a summer, together with great follow up by professional designers has taken my skills to a new level. It has also been cool to try different technologies like VR in to the design process, seeing what skills are needed for the designers of tomorrow. Winning the competition has really opened a lot of doors for me. You get in touch with many people from the industry and the tools to get your automotive design career going. The icing on the cake was of course going to the Shanghai studio seeing the physical mockup of my alias model, something you cannot get from any other competition. As a student I would really embrace this opportunity to take a first step into the professional world.”

To view more of Trym’s design work follow him on Instagram -@abrahamsen_design