FDSA 2026: Dr. Rena Liu Champions Design Excellence at CSD College through Future Design Star

by Monisha Sivanesan

With a visionary outlook, Dr. Rena Liu inducts CSD College into the Future Design Star Award initiative, signalling her dedication to shaping confident, globally competitive designers and elevating creative education

We sat down with Dr. Rena Liu, Founder of CSD College, during their MOU signing with the 2026 Future Design Star Award (FDSA) for a short interview on her prevailing expectations around the initiative and for her participating students.

Established in 2009, CSD College aspires to narrow the divide between education and employment. Through hands-on learning, real industry projects and professional guidance, it prepares students to step confidently into the creative industry as designers, creatives or future entrepreneurs. Ergo, it is a given that the institution deeply understands the constantly evolving discipline of design, making this collaboration with the Future Design Star initiative completely instinctive.

CSD College signs MOU with Future Design Star Award

Exclusive interview with Dr. Rena Liu

Why did CSD College join FDSA? What do you hope to result from joining as an institution?

We joined this platform because we don’t want our students to only stay inside the classrooms. Rather, we want our students to gain more real-world exposure and more experience with industry-level design. Through FDS, our students will be able to face real design challenges and build up their confidence.

What expectations do you have for the students who participate in the initiative?

We expect our students to take this seriously, not just as a competition but as a learning and growth journey. Their discipline, responsibility and openness to feedback are very important.

Where do you see FDS going in the future?

We see FDS growing beyond the concept of a competition. It has the potential to become a design platform connecting institutions and young designers.

About the 2026 Future Design Star Award

The Future Design Star Award is an initiative that 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 live presentation stage will receive their win at the DOTY 2026 ceremony, where they gain access to a crowd of Malaysia’s most elite design studios and industry partners.