The Oneshow China Student Workshop
One of my best experiences in 2006 was clearly the Oneshow China Student Workshop. Like in the years before, the Oneclub is organizing the nationwide student competition inviting young students of design, art and advertising schools to participate doing ads. The students could choose one of two briefs, one for mastercard and one for hybridcenter.org, and then submit their print, tv and online ads to the organizers. All together there were 1800 entries from 160 schools from 30 provinces. What an impressive number. The judges were also quite impressive. A bunch of local judges like myself were complimented by people the likes of Joe Duffy, Jeff Benjamin and other very acclaimed advertising and design professionals.
After the first round voting by all judges, 160 finalists were invited to participate in the Beijing workshop. The workshop meant to get up at 7 on a Saturday and Sunday and drive out to Tsinghua University to hold the lessons. I was the lucky only interactive guy amongst all judges and teachers, so i got to hold my own workshop with around 20 young students from all around the country. The two days were extreme fun. We discussed, analyzed, critizised and reworked the submissions and evaluated each other's books and favorite works. The key issue we found is that Chinese designers are very self-focused and do what ever they think might be right. No frame of reference, no original thought process, in most of the cases. Naturally I spend quite some time talking about things like message, benefit, idea and research. All those lead to good ideas and good creative work.
On Sunday evening then, the big award ceremony was held in a Beijing club. Wang Lei, my favorite Chinese experimental electronic musician performed, and (some of) the students had the happiest day in their life!