Born and raised in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, Lai moved to Rome in 1972, where he studied and received a BA in industrial design at the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche. After seeing an opening for car designer at Ford of Germany, in 1978 Lai received a two-year full scholarship for master's degree study on transportation design at the RCA Royal College of Art in London.
In 1980, winner and recipient of the John Ogier Memorial Design Bursary of the Royal Society of Arts.
Career
After his graduation from RCA in 1980,[1] he started working for the Fordwerke in Cologne, Germany. In 1982–83 he went on a joint venture project to work in Ghia Studios (Italy) and Mazda in Japan, where he worked on a specialty car program as a result of winning the internal competition. He worked on the Sierra, Fiesta, Escort, and Scorpio projects.
After returning to Germany, he joined BMW in 1984 as a senior designer. He won the design of E36 program (the BMW 3 Series). In 1989, he was invited by the president of R&D of Porsche AG to join the design team Porsche Styling as studio chief. Since then, he has worked on all the models from the factory, from the Boxster to the Cayman, including the revolutionary 996, the first major departure from Ferdinand Alexander "Butzi" Porsche's original design for the 911 in four decades.
Since 2004, he was appointed the chief designer for all external projects at Porsche Styling, handling all transportation design for clients from Japan, Korea, China, and Europe. Projects ranged from high-performance motor bike design to design face-lifting of an over-300-meter-long cruise liner.
Invitations as key-note speaker and distinguished speaker:
November 2012 WPO (Hong Kong chapter);
July 2013 Moet Hennessy Gala-Dinner, Taipei, Taiwan;
April 2014 Oklahoma State University, school of Architecture;
October 2014 Hong Kong University; Entrepreneurs Organization; Hong Kong Polytechnic university; Stanford University Alumni; Columbia University Alumni; Hong Kong Chinese University;
December 2015 The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology;
April 2017 Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan university;
June 2022 Keynote Speaker at the Royal College of Art China Forum with over 3 million of audience via Zoom;
July 2022 Invitation by the Royal College of Art Students and Scholars Association (RCACSSA) to hold the Lifetime Honorary Chairman of the Royal College of Art Chinese Alumni Association.
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