Three might be 10 vacancies for one designer in Shenzhen, but few local designers -- especially designers freshly from college - were good enough to fill the vacancies.

Foreign designers in Shenzhen called for the training of more local designers in the city's first-ever seminar of expat designers held at the Shenzhen Press Tower yesterday.

The seminar, organized by the Shenzhen Daily and the Shenzhen Creative Culture Center, attracted 11 senior expat designers from various fields.

"It's a shame that as a company based in Shenzhen we don't have a Chinese designer," said American Paul Goetz, from the Gnosis Product Dev. "It's very difficult for us to recruit local designers. Most Chinese factories have good engineers, but most of them don't understand design," he added.

"Ninety percent of our products are exported to North America. But there is an enormous market in China," he said, adding that local talents would help his company understand the Chinese culture and explore the Chinese market.

Andy Shin, a South Korean-American designer of RS Design, also said that "getting Chinese designers" was a weak point of Shenzhen, which he described as a city of "hope and dream."

"Compared with foreign designers, local Chinese designers are skillful, but design is more than drawing and they need to have their own envision," said Shin. "I want Shenzhen to be a city of design education," he added.

Jonathan Bach, a professor from the New School of the United States, who was visiting Shenzhen for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, said Shenzhen should have a design school that combine theory and practice. The combination of factories, technologies, design firms and art in Shenzhen would make Shenzhen's school of design more than an education institution, he said.

"Shenzhen should create a design school similar to Bauhaus," he said. "The idea image of Shenzhen as a city of design is the Shenzhen School of Design," he said.

Shenzhen is building a college of design, said Xuan Zhuxi, editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Press Group. Xuan called on the designers to give suggestions to the government on the college.

Xuan also invited the foreign designers to attend the cultural events in Shenzhen such as the International Cultural Industries Fair.

The designers also suggested that Shenzhen should improve public transport, hold more cultural events, increase communications between designers of different fields, and simplify the visa-application procedure for foreign designers.

Xuan said similar events would be held in the future to create a platform of long-term communication between foreign designers, the media and the Creative Culture Center.