FDSA 2025: Dr. Myron Liu’s perspective on Future Design Star Award

by Aisha Capulong

Dr. Myron Liu leads his institution with a mindset of, "What can bring more to our students?", and joining the Future Design Star initiative proved to be the natural next step in levelling up Mobius Academy

We sat down with Dr. Myron Liu — Co-founder, Studio Principal and Art Director of Mobius Academy — during their MOU signing with the inaugural Future Design Star Award programme for a short interview on his expectations for his students and what he hopes they can gain from the initiative. Mobius Academy prides itself on making art education accessible to as many learners as possible, since talent in and of itself is something that can be crafted by anyone with the passion and dedication for their art.

Mobius Academy signs MOU with Future Design Star Award

Exclusive interview with Dr. Myron Liu

How do you think the Future Design Star Award initiative will benefit your students at Mobius Academy?

We always think, “What can bring more to our students?”, so in terms of giving them more skill sets, giving them more exposure, giving them more even through extra classes, more competitions to submit, then we have a chance to push them. For students, they really need platforms to explore. When they go out, they see other school works, they have more confidence, so [it gives] them a very good opportunity to step out to discover themselves more.

What are your expectations from your students who will qualify for the Future Design Star Award?

For FDSA, we will get a chance to filter and pick what we feel is the best of the best to submit to the competition. We expect the students to get [excited] when we select [them]. The students that have been selected then go through a process [where] we improve whatever they have now, we will guide them more to improve not just [in] design, [but also] overall presentations. We sharpen up their presentation technique verbally. We’ll go through slides, go through trainings, typically, so it’s a very different experience for students. The students will definitely get another level of improvement, and also evolve.

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.