On December 20th, the 2025 Forum on Design Education Paradigms Sparked by the Trirotor Model, hosted by SUES Design School (in preparation), was successfully held at the Changning Campus. Focusing on a new talent cultivation model featuring the deep integration of Design + Engineering + Management, the forum gathered renowned experts, scholars, and industry leaders from multiple universities. Participants engaged in in-depth discussions on disciplinary restructuring, pedagogical reform, and the future development of design education.
SUES President Lou Yongqi delivered a speech via video. He noted that current global technological progress, industrial structure adjustments, and shifts in social needs are profoundly reshaping the landscape of higher education, rendering single-discipline-oriented talent cultivation models inadequate to effectively address real-world complex challenges. The 3-wings model, grounded in engineering, led by design, and supported by management, emphasizes promoting multidisciplinary collaboration in real-world contexts. It represents a key educational innovation concept gradually refined by SUES through long-term practice. President Lou stressed that the Design School (in preparation) serves as a critical vehicle for deepening the “3-wings” talent cultivation model. He urged the School to align with national strategies and industrial demands, adhere to problem-oriented and application-oriented approaches, foster cross-schools, cross-disciplinary, and cross-scenario collaborative mechanisms, and explore a new design education paradigm with the unique characteristics of SUES. Expressing affirmation of the forum’s hosting, President Lou Yongqi hoped that participating experts and scholars would provide forward-looking suggestions and intellectual support for SUES’ design discipline development and the cultivation of world-class applied innovative talents through in-depth exchanges.
Professor Joseph Press and Professor Gao Zhu delivered welcome speeches respectively. Professor Press highlighted the integrative role of design in complex social contexts and introduced the connotation of “spinnovation”. Professor Gao noted that the forum not only marked an important academic gathering during the Design School’s preparatory phase but also served as a systematic ideological dialogue centered on the “3-wings” model.
In the keynote forum session, Han Ting (Distinguished Professor at the School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Wang Guozhong (Professor at SUES and Executive Vice Dean of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Industry), Xu Jiang (Dean of the School of Design, East China Normal University), and Sun Jie (Dean of the School of Design, Dong Hua University) delivered keynote reports. They provided in-depth responses to key issues in design education innovation driven by the “3-wings” model from diverse perspectives, including theoretical frontiers, teaching practices, and disciplinary ecosystems.
The forum featured five parallel sub-forum sessions, where 20 experts from universities and industries combined their instructional and practical experiences to discuss five thematic panels: Products and Travel, Environment and Scenarios, Media and Entertainment, Human-Machine Collaborative Design, and Design Strategy and Management. On-site exchanges were lively, with frequent collisions of ideas.
The successful hosting of this academic forum has built a high-level, open academic exchange platform for the Design School (in preparation). It also lays a solid foundation for SUES to advance design education innovation, deepen the integration of engineering and management, and explore a new paradigm for cultivating applied innovative talents under the guidance of the “3-wings” concept.
