The Creative Wharf – Magic Box Carnival, the 2013 Shanghai Youth Creative Gathering, will open in the open air near Shanghai Ocean Aquarium, Pudong district, from Sept 6 to 15.

Containers will be changed into platforms, photo shops, gyms and restaurants to showcase different creations. The event, held by a charity, aims to provide people with a way to inspire and exchange ideas and self-made gadgets. Shanghai, an oriental pearl in East China, is on its way to becoming an international city of design. It is a distribution center for creative ideas and a melting pot for excellent design works and avant-garde thinking. Many famous international design companies have set up offices in Shanghai. High-level design prizes and expos have also come in large numbers. Luxury brands are also seeking to cooperate with designers here.

Shanghai offers a variety of development programs for creative personnel, providing them space to experiment. For example, Zhou Yi, who worked at Sany Group in the past, hopes to explore new ways to combine high technology and industrial design. He created Shanghai’s first private-owned industry design institute. "In the age of IT and big data, individual designers, data collection, and information processing and arrangement depends more and more on common knowledge and technology platforms," said Su Yunsheng, head of the technology development department of the urban planning and design institute of Tongji University, Shanghai.

As an outstanding city of design, Shanghai attracts not only local talents, but also skilled overseas personnel. Ni Haijun, who holds a master's degree in art and design from the University of Birmingham, UK, established an advertisement design company in Shanghai. He is also a visiting professor at a university in Hamburg, Germany. He is learning and introducing related information from home and abroad.

"City of Design" is one of seven categories in the Creative Cities Network, a program patronized by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). To date, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Nagoya, Kobe, Seoul, Graz and Saint-Etienne have been designated as a "City of Design".