2024 World Design Cities Conference opens in Shanghai

The World Design Cities Conference (WDCC) 2024, organized by the Shanghai Municipal People's Government and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), opened in east China's Shanghai on Friday.

Running under the theme "Design Reframing Growth", the four-day event aims to build a platform for global design collaboration and exchange. It seeks to explore a design-driven approach for new quality productive development and promote the integration of design into all aspects of urban and daily life.

This is the third consecutive year that Shanghai has hosted the conference, bringing together nearly 1,000 representatives from international design industry organizations, design schools and leading enterprises, as well as renowned scholars and designers from home and abroad.

Participants will share design concepts, cutting-edge technologies and market trends in different fields through nearly 50 activities, including forums, roundtable dialogues, exhibitions and design carnivals, aiming at advancing global design innovation.

The opening ceremony also witnessed a series of announcements, including the World Design Cities Shanghai Manifesto 2024, which calls on the world to embrace future trends and develop designs driven by new quality productive forces to better address the challenges of human development.

The winners of the 2024 Shanghai Design 100+, including three annual awards -- the AI Innovation Design Award, the Green Sustainable Design Award, and the Cultural Creative Design Award, were also revealed during the event.

China's first AI-generated animated series 'Poems of Timeless Acclaim,' jointly produced by the CMG and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, got the AI Innovation Design Award.

The event also announced the winners of the third Frontier Design Prize, which aims to encourage and lead the development of design innovation by recognizing people and works that have made pioneering contributions to the field of design around the world.

2024 World Design Cities Conference opens in Shanghai

The three astronauts aboard China's Shenzhou-23 spaceship have entered the country's Tiangong space station and met with their astronaut colleagues early Monday morning, as they now begin an in-orbit crew handover.

Mission commander Zhu Yangzhu and fellow astronauts Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying successfully entered the station's core module Tianhe after the spaceship made a fast automated rendezvous and docked with the Tianhe module at 02:45 (Beijing Time) on Monday.

The three Shenzhou-21 crew members opened the hatch at 05:13 (Beijing Time) and greeted the new arrivals, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

The six astronauts then took group pictures for the eighth in-orbit get-together in China's aerospace history.

Notably, one of the Shenzhou-23 crew members is set to undertake a year-long stay aboard the space station, double the usual duration of previous Shenzhou missions.

The Shenzhou-23 spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 23:08 (Beijing Time) on Sunday.

Shenzhou-23 marks the 40th flight of China's manned spaceflight program and the seventh manned flight mission since the Tiangong space station entered its application and development phase in late 2022.

Shenzhou-23 astronauts enter Tiangong space station, meet Shenzhou-21 crew