On August 15, Vice President Chen Shou and his staff from Hunan University (HNU), along with the Executive Vice President, Dr. Jeremy Haefner, and his staff from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), paid a visit to Shenzhen and discussed with Huang Guoqiang, deputy secretary general of Shenzhen municipal government, on the issue of the Shenzhen Featured Institute of Industrial Design.

On the afternoon of August 15, representatives from HNU and RIT signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Baoan District, Shenzhen, on setting up the institute there, a cooperation project of the two universities. Zuo Quanwen, the section chief of International Cooperation and Exchange Department of HNU, and He Renke, the dean of School of Design, attended this visit and negotiations.

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is known for subjects like design, art, and imaging science.

The proposed Shenzhen Featured Institute of Industrial Design by Sino-US Cooperation (provisional name) will be “a city of design”, under the strong teamwork of these two elite schools, well-known in the circle of industrial design. The featured institute will be built in Baoan, an industrial region, with the planned school land being about 40,000 square meters. This school will implement “internationalization, digitization, and industrialization” as its idea, insist on bilingual teaching in both Chinese and English, recruit and enroll international teachers and students at a high proportion, combine technologies like mobile internet and Internet of Things, and integrate industrial environment of Shenzhen with the needs of industrial upgrading to run the school. This school is mainly for academic education, covering undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral level studies.