Mauro Porcini, Samsung Electronics’ first-ever chief design officer, sees his path main design at among the world’s largest firms as one thing near a calling.
“It felt like faith, God, or whatever you believe in, was looking down and saying ‘Wait a second, before going after your dream, you need to prepare yourself. You need to be ready,’” Porcini says in his workplace at Samsung’s R&D middle close to Seoul’s energetic Gangnam district. “I needed to get ready for probably my dream job: Being in tech, in a world where tech is about to completely change the way we live.”
Porcini feels barely out-of-place within the Korean chaebol’s places of work. Hailing from Gallarate, a small city exterior of Milan, Porcini wears plaid trousers with white racing stripes down the aspect, platform boots, and a beige jacket with a purple lapel, fairly totally different from the extra plainly-dressed Korean designers and workplace staff that sit at Samsung’s desks.
For many years, Samsung, maker of client electronics like smartphones, televisions, pc displays and fridges, relied on its huge inside design workforce to develop into a model rivaling Apple in status.
However renewed competitors now threatens to unseat the International 500 producer from its place on the high of the patron electronics market. Apple seemingly overtook Samsung to develop into the No. 1 smartphone vendor in 2025 for the primary time in over a decade, in line with Counterpoint Analysis, a market intelligence agency. And up-and-coming Chinese language companies like Xiaomi (for telephones) and TCL (for TVs) are beginning to encroach on Samsung’s premium markets. Then add AI, which threatens to shake up what sensible gadgets can do.
Samsung has thus turned to an outsider—Porcini—and requested him use his method to design to assist the Korean firm to raised compete with its rivals “How can we evolve our portfolio to be as meaningful as possible to people and to the business? This is the overall mission.” Porcini asks. “How can we create the best possible products? What is their identity? How do people interact with them?”
It’s a continued guess on design from the International 500 firm, whilst price pressures and new applied sciences might restrict the company urge for food for costly human designers.
A profession of firsts
Porcini might, arguably, be known as essentially the most certified company designer in enterprise in the present day. Few others have labored at so many Fortune International 500 firms: 3M (No. 489), PepsiCo (No. 115), and now Samsung (No. 27).
In 2011, he took over design duties at 3M, the place he fought to make aesthetics a part of the product course of. “If I was making beautiful and functional products in ugly packaging, or if the experience in retail or digital was wrong, we were going to go nowhere,” he recollects. Porcini went into the sector: “It wasn’t easy, because it wasn’t in my job description,” he says. “I needed to step on the toes of so many people.”
A 12 months later, PepsiCo tapped him to be its first-ever head of design. “Industrial designers in tech, historically, focus on the product,” he says. “What I learned in consumer packaged goods was the importance of the overall experience with the brand.”
Each 3M and PepsiCo gave Porcini an appreciation for what non-designers deliver to the dialog. “The ideal configuration is one where you have designers coming in with a human-centric approach, you have marketing coming in with a business perspective, and R&D coming in with a technology perspective,” he says.
A return to tech roots
Samsung is a return, of types, for Porcini. The designer wrote his grasp’s thesis on wearables, foreseeing how sensible clothes and different applied sciences might develop into a part of each day life even earlier than wi-fi applied sciences like Wifi and Bluetooth had been customary. And when Porcini introduced PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi world wide to have a look at leaders in design, he made positive to make a cease at Samsung.
“We came all the way to Seoul in 2013 to meet the top management of Samsung and really understand how it was investing in design,” he remembers. Porcini highlights two classes he realized from Samsung: A relentless push to reinvent and revitalize its merchandise, and “uniting the entire organization around one design mission.”
That forward-thinking method will be attributed to late chairman Lee Kun-Hee, who pushed Samsung, one of many mega-conglomerates or chaebols that dominate South Korea’s economic system, to ditch its repute as a quick follower and compete with the perfect firms in client tech. In his 1993 “Frankfurt Declaration,” Lee urged executives to “change everything except your wife and children.”
“Lee understood design’s power in digital technology,” says Youngjin Yoo, a professor on the London College of Economics and former Samsung adviser.
Samsung designers studied how individuals interacted with gadgets; for instance, shoppers preserve their TVs off for a lot of the day; they’re extra like a chunk of furnishings than a supply of leisure. Samsung handled the tv because the centerpiece to a room, a philosophy the corporate continues in the present day with screens that would cross for artwork when not in use. (Porcini, throughout our dialog, factors to what appears like a replica of Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” behind him. “Did you know that’s a TV?” he says.)
“What Samsung did with the Bespoke line of refrigerators [a fully customizable model] and other categories was pretty brave,” Porcini says. “We need to double down on what the company is already doing, and take it to the next level.”
Nonetheless, Samsung is dogged by accusations that it copies its competitors. Apple sued Samsung in 2011 for allegedly infringing its design patents; the 2 giants settled their lengthy authorized feud in 2018.
Yoo thinks the corporate misplaced momentum after the 2016 Galaxy Notice 7 disaster, when exploding batteries pressured a large recall. “Samsung could have continued to innovate. But I think they stalled in a way,” he stated.
Now, Samsung must grapple with find out how to combine AI into its sensible merchandise, which don’t appear fairly as sensible as they used to in an age of LLMs and AI brokers. But firms massive and small have but to crack the code on find out how to make a really AI-enabled system. Early experiments, just like the Humane AI pin, have flopped because of excessive costs and poor efficiency.
Samsung is aggressively pushing its AI throughout its merchandise, with Samsung Electronics co-CEO Roh Tae-moon promising to get its Galaxy AI companies onto 800 million cell gadgets this 12 months. “We will apply AI to all products, all functions, and all services as quickly as possible,” he advised Reuters in an early January interview.
Design’s worth within the age of AI
AI additionally poses a menace to designers. Generative AI could possibly be a vastly great tool for creatives, permitting them to mock up and refine concepts far more rapidly and at a lot decrease prices. However AI might additionally automate their work, which might threaten jobs as firms pay nearer consideration to prices.
Maybe unsurprisingly, he’s optimistic that AI will, in truth, reinforce the worth that human designers can deliver to firms. “Eventually, AI and robots will become a commodity,” he suggests. “Technology is a tool.”
And “in an age of extreme technology, businesses need the best humans more than ever,” he says. “Designers are the ambassadors for human beings. And creating value for humans is one of the most powerful competitive advantages you can build at a company.”
