I have just returned from a quick weekend trip to Kushan, a town just to the west of Shanghai, and the centre of 60% of the world’s laptop manufacturing. Companies familiar to us, such as Lenovo, and some less so, such as Great Wall, compete to create ever thinner, clearer and longer battery life version of the ubiquitous laptop of whch there are many more made than conventional PC’s.

China’s success in this area is impressive but even more impressive is their realisation that the future is one of design and that creating more innovative, useful and attractive technology products is key to moving China beyond an OEM and unbranded manufacturer to a position of true global success.

This story is familiar to me as I experienced it with Korean manufacturing. In the early 1990’s my design company Tangerine began working for Korean companies such as LG and Samsung and it quickly became clear that they had huge global aspirations. Hidden in the shadow of Japan, Korea had a strategy to move away from a source of lower cost labour and OEM manufacturing for more famous Japanese brands and develop their own brands. They saw design as the key to unlock success in the US and European markets.

So when I joined Samsung as European Head of Design, I was shown the work of IDEO, Frog, Porsche and many other leading designers who had been invited to transform their product lines, from mobile phones to microwaves, computers to refrigerators.

It was a mess of course, and each design had the brand values of the design company rather than this new, globally aspiring brand Samsung. But design was the key, and they put design at the top of their strategy, building ever large design teams in Seoul and around the world.

In many ways China is in a similar position. Due to the size of it’s home market, and some shrewd acquisitions such as Lenovo buying IBM’s ThinkPad operations, China already owns the largest share of the market.

But they see the transformation and added value that Apple have created and also realise that they cannot simply follow, they must innovate and transform themselves to sustain success and remain competitive.

So to the Kushan Cup. The cup is a design award to which all companies and students in China were invited to enter with the remit to explore and show new ideas around portable computing. I was invited to judge and give a speech to an impressive looking line up of around 300 national and local dignitaries and business leaders.

The first day was for judging. There were about 20 designers from across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong plus myself and Andrew Rogers, an Australian designer who has recently opened an office in Beijing. Each candidate gave a 5 minute presentation followed by 5 minutes of questions from us.

Designing computer devices has clearly got a whole lot more difficult since Apple. What else do you do after Jonathan Ive and has team have defined the perfect laptop, tablet and phone so minimally and with such attention to detail? But these designers went at it with great enthusiasm, developing emotional themes, textures and finishes, evoking childhood memories of toys or examining how we use these transportable screens to find clues and catalysts for new shapes, formats and usage.

The standard of presentation was incredible, drippingly glossy surfaces, carefully posed shadows and reflections showing off the state of contemporary computer rendering packages. But there was the problem; only one of the 30 or so candidates had made a model, or explored in any way the reality of holding and using their spectacular designs.

An interesting development was the preamble, where globe saving principles and ideas were explained before showing the design of….another laptop! But I was delighted at the thought, effort and sheer creativity that went into all of the submissions. Any thought I had that Chinese design might not be up to the “standard” of Western design was thrown out.

But most of the designs shown in the Kushan competition were essentially styling, unable to challenge the essential concept of the technical object. All except the winning design, which impressively managed to bring new ideas to the hand held digital tablet.

The next day saw the award ceremony. Speaker after speaker rose to the podiom, each to the Star Wars theme, to tell of us of the importance of design to China’s future. A treasury minister told the audience that he rarely speaks at events due to his workload but broke from preparing Cina’s 5 year strategic plan because he thought this issue was so important. The Minister for Industrial Design spoke, as did VPs from Lenova and other major companies. They spoke of the future, of the impact of Cloud computing, of the internet and things, and were excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities of these developments.

And as I return to the UK I await news of whether the Design Council, an organisation that has strived to improve the UK’s ability to take advantage of design to ensure our products, and now services and public sector compete and succeed, still exists. I spent nearly three years working with the Design Council and count the accomplishments there, bringing knowledge of design to business leaders and politicians, developing transformational programs such as Designing Demand, as the ones I am most proud of.

The Design Council is hugely respected around the world, is much copied and, I believe, had a major impact on the success of British business at home and abroad. In this political mood of a bonfire of the quangos, it is easy to see it as unnecessary, or out of time. Indeed the, the design community has never supported it, misunderstanding it’s role as some sort of protector and union for the industry. It was never that, it was a force for change in the users of design, to help them realise the value design can bring to their activities.

So as China gears up to design, the UK will gear down. I wish good luck to the young designers of China, who will surely play an important role in the continuing success of China. And I lament the lack of support and understanding of design in government, business and our intelligentsia who fail to see, in a creative and knowledge based economy, the importance of design as a process, methodology and creative force for success.