On June 24th, the “Beyond Form, Across Layers” Joint Exhibition, showcasing outstanding graduation projects by the 2025 graduates of Shanghai’s Class IV Peak Discipline in Design, opened at the Industry-Education Integration Building on Changning Campus. The exhibition was organized by School of Art and Design. Present at the opening were SUES President Lou Yongqi; Vice President Xu Kaiyu; and deans, faculty, and students from Tongji University (the lead institution of the Class IV Peak Discipline), Dong Hua University, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Institute of Technology, and SUES.
Declaring the exhibition open, President Lou Yongqi reflected on a decade of joint progress, noting that the strong “intra-city synergistic effect” among the five universities has been a key driver of their shared accomplishments. He expressed hope that the exhibition would mark a new starting point—one that deepens collaborative talent cultivation, elevates the level of joint innovation, and opens a new chapter in design education through interdisciplinary integration and stronger industry connections.
Vice President Xu Kaiyu remarked that the joint exhibition brings together outstanding graduation projects from five leading universities in Shanghai. SUES has long upheld an industry-embedded approach to education and developed a “tri-rotor” innovation model driven by the integration of engineering, management, and design. Through this approach, SUES is committed to cultivating high-caliber design talents with global vision and a spirit of innovation.
Gao Zhu, Dean of School of Art and Design, stated that leveraging the platform of Shanghai’s Class IV Peak Discipline in Design, the School remains actively engaged in exploring the evolving meaning of design and new talent development models in the digital-intelligence era. It is also working to embed the design discipline more deeply into the industrial innovation ecosystem.
Featuring over 70 graduation projects from five universities, the exhibition offers a cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspective on design. Young designers, wielding technology as their brush and drawing on the ink of the humanities, re-imagine the boundaries of design in a space where the virtual and the real converge. These works not only align with the evaluation criteria of “innovation, scholarliness, applicability, completeness, and practicality,” but also exemplify the spirit of exploration that drives Shanghai’s Class IV Peak Discipline in Design.