Cathy Huang, President of CBi China Bridge, delivered a speech on “China’s community past, current and future” at the 2011 IDSA conference in New Orleans at the end of September.

The IDSA conference is a major event for design professionals and participants had the chance to listen to leading business and industry leaders. The focus on the conference this year was community. Why is community important in design? It's because today users play a bigger role in design by helping to define the process of creating products and services.

As China shifts from command to market-based economy, the Chinese are evolving a new sense of community. For hundreds of years Chinese people have held family and extended family as a prime value. How those values affect and shape the current market? In Cathy’s speech, she shared some of the insights gained from the eight years research, shed light on both the current consumer as well as the developing market shifts.

IDSA, Industrial Designers Society of America, is the world’s largest and oldest, member-driven society for industrial and product design, interaction design, human factors, ergonomics, design research, design management, universal design and related design fields.

More pictures from the IDSA conference can be found here.