BA Art & Design

The Department of Art & Design, one of the most distinctive departments in Hefei University, has developed its running mode featuring industry and education combination after years of exploration.

It offers six undergraduate specialties, i.e., Industrial Design, Product Design, Visual Communication Design, Environmental Design, Animation, Art, and Technology. At present, the department has 1,200 full-time students and a faculty of 60 including three professors and 6 associate professors. The department has over 10 visiting professors from Hannover University of Applied Sciences of Germany, Magdeburg University of Applied Sciences, Hanbat University of Korea, Taiwan Ming Chuan University and Yunlin University of Science and Technology. To expand the visions of students, corporate executives and experienced designers are invited and lectures are given on a regular basis.

Laboratories such as Model Processing, Rapid Prototyping, Photocopying, Three-dimensional Animation, Two-dimensional Animation, and Computer-Aided Design serve the needs of art teaching well. In addition, there are five provincial college students Maker Laboratories of Art Design, Industrial Design, Visual Communication Design, Environmental Space Design and Animation Design.

For local economic development, the industry-university-research platform of the department(Anhui Shenzhuang & Heda Industrial Design Co.Ltd.) co-established a research and development center with Royalstar Small Household Appliances Group. As the only industrial design enterprise among universities in Anhui Province, this platform is awarded Anhui Provincial and Hefei Industrial Design Center by the Economic and Information Commission of both Anhui Province and Hefei City. Lin Huiqing, Deputy Minister of Education, once remarked that the industry-university-research model has found its way in Hefei University, and the university leads the exploration and innovation.

The department has good relationships with many universities and enterprises both home and abroad. For 13 successive years, it has successfully organized international workshops, inviting teachers and students from Germany, Korea, and Taiwan to join some practical project design.

Hefei University (HFU), previously known as Hefei Union University, is an undergraduate university founded in 1980. It was “born in the era of reform and opening-up, and develops in the period of innovation”. During its early years, the university put forward a school-running mode that features “appropriate tuition, self-job-finding, discipline inlinewith practical needs, and logistics outsourcing”, which aroused great interest of the society and was covered by mainstream media like People’s Daily and Guangming Daily. The university was once honored as a forerunner in China’s Higher Education Reform.

In March 2002, approved by the Ministry of Education, Hefei University was set up based on the previous Hefei Union University, Hefei Institute of Education, and Hefei Normal School. Since then, the university has persisted in its guideline of “serving the local, training students into applied talent and strengthening cooperation with foreign higher-learning institutions”. It has made good use of the experience of the universities of applied sciences in Germany(Fachhochschule) and created a distinctive application-oriented cultivation system with a focus on key factors to improve the ability and skills of students. Thanks to the system reform and implementation thereof, the university has succeeded in producing a great many high-caliber professionals for local development. Since 2009, the students of HFU have won 246 prizes in national sci-tech innovation contests, among which 47 are first prizes and special prizes, and some are even the only one or the first time rewarded to a university in Anhui Province. Moreover, the students have won 118 gold medals, 72 silvers, and 68 bronzes in sports events. HFU was awarded a national second teaching achievement prize with the project “Research, Innovation, and Practice-based on Experience from Applied Talent Training System in German Undergraduate Universities” in 2009, and then the first prize in 2014, which is the top prize to a provincial university of Anhui.