FDSA 2025: Asst. Prof. CK Teoh on the promising Future Design Star

by Aisha Capulong

Under his leadership, Asst. Prof. CK Teoh champions a penchant for community engagement in his students, and with hopes of branching out to the masses, he signs UCSI University as part of Future Design Star

We sat down with Assistant Professor CK Teoh — Deputy Dean of UCSI University’s School of Architecture and Built Environment — during their MOU signing with the inaugural Future Design Star Award programme for a short interview on his hopes, expectations and what he foresees the initiative leading to.

At UCSI University, students are made to interact with real world applications almost as naturally as every other aspect of their education journey, so it is par for the course that the institution is among the first to take part in the Future Design Star Award — an initiative developed to submerge students in an experience mimicking the competitive nature of the design industry.

UCSI University signs MOU with Future Design Star Award

Exclusive interview with Asst. Prof. CK Teoh

What do you hope the Future Design Star initiative will achieve for your students and the general public?

This is very exciting news. We see that it is important for our students to connect to the larger community of the industry so that they get exposure. We really hope that they will see the importance of being up to standard, or even [going] beyond. They need to understand what is happening outside campus. So far, we’ve been doing a lot of community engagement but we haven’t got the chance to level it up to a platform where we can actually showcase the students’ work to a wider audience.

In the past, we’ve [participated] in [competitions] organised by professional [bodies], but I believe FDS will enable us to shine to a wider audience. Usually, [competitions] held by professional [bodies] will just be known [to] people in [the] industry, so we hope that [FDS] will be a bigger platform [to] reach out to someone who is not too sure about design.

What are your expectations from the Future Design Star Award?

In order to come to the competition, to be able to expose themselves within the industry, [the students] must meet high standards of quality. My expectation for this programme is that we hope to close the gap. The students will understand what is expected by the industry [and] at the same time, the industry will understand what is happening at the schools. We close the gap, and [only] then [can] actual intellectual dialogue[s] happen.

Introducing the Future Design Star Award

The 15th installation of the DOTY Awards will see the introduction of an exciting new category: the Future Design Star Award! This new award initiative seeks to discover and platform young talents within verified design institutions across the nation whose work reveals an immense level of potential for the industry.

With a unique system in place, ACGMEDIA works directly with a handful of distinguished schools and academies across Malaysia to bottleneck only the very best projects — eliminating the ambiguity of participants and solidifying the relationship between the institution and its award candidate students.

The Future Design Star Award evaluation process requires each member institution to submit a fixed number of their very best student projects. The top three students of each school will then present to a panel of esteemed judges to compete for the ultimate prize: winning at the DOTY level. Following this, the three student projects that led the institutional stage will receive their win at the DOTY 2025 Gala Dinner, where they gain access to a crowd of Malaysia’s most elite design studios and industry partners.