FDSA 2025: Ts. Charlenne Ong on her expectations for the Future Design Star Award

by Aisha Capulong

Ts. Charlenne Ong expresses her excitement in joining the 2025 Future Design Star Award, an initiative developed to submerge students in an experience mimicking the competitive nature of the design industry

We sat down with Ts. Charlenne Ong, Founder and Principal of MTTC College, during her institution’s MOU signing with the inaugural Future Design Star Award programme for a short interview on her expectations for the initiative and the direction she sees both her students and FDSA going in the future. MTTC College’s charm is its practical, hands-on approach to education, so it comes as no surprise that the institution is among FDSA’s very first partners.

MTTC College signs MOU with Future Design Star Award

Exclusive interview with Ts. Charlenne Ong

What are your expectations from Future Design Star Award as an initiative?

To win or not to win, to me, is not the most important thing. I hope my students take this opportunity as a stage to showcase their work and to see how [other] people are doing so that they know how to leverage themselves — so that they’ll not [be] shocked by the industry later on.

What do you want to see more out of FDSA moving forward?

In the future, I would think that if we could have industry related courses or workshops, industry speaking sessions, or even a mentor-mentee kind of program, that will actually highly encourage the students to simulate themselves in the working environment — and moving forward, not just in Malaysia, but we see our students being able to compete in Southeast Asia or Asia! Raise their standards to meet the global demand and global design trends. [It] will be really cool when we have an industry leader being their mentor and students from different universities become the mentees, [and] at the end, they will [be] able to bring their designs up to the standards that these mentors were expecting.

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.