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Mauro Porcini, Samsung Electronics\u2019 first-ever chief design officer, sees his path leading design at some of the world\u2019s largest companies as something close to a calling.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt felt like faith, God, or whatever you believe in, was looking down and saying \u2018Wait a second, before going after your dream, you need to prepare yourself. You need to be ready,\u2019\u201d Porcini says in his office at Samsung\u2019s R&D center near Seoul\u2019s lively Gangnam district. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Porcini feels slightly out-of-place in the Korean chaebol\u2019s <\/em>offices. Hailing from Gallarate, a small town outside of Milan, Porcini wears plaid trousers with white racing stripes down the side, platform boots, and a beige jacket with a red lapel, quite different from the more plainly-dressed Korean designers and office workers that sit at Samsung\u2019s desks.<\/p>\n For decades, Samsung, maker of consumer electronics like smartphones, televisions, computer monitors and refrigerators, relied on its vast internal design workforce to become a brand rivaling Apple in prestige. <\/p>\n But renewed competition now threatens to unseat the Global 500 manufacturer from its place at the top of the consumer electronics market. Apple likely overtook Samsung to become the No. 1 smartphone seller in 2025 for the first time in over a decade, according to Counterpoint Research, a market intelligence firm. And up-and-coming Chinese firms like Xiaomi (for phones) and TCL (for TVs) are starting to encroach on Samsung\u2019s premium markets. Then add AI, which threatens to shake up what smart devices can do.\u00a0<\/p>\n Samsung has thus turned to an outsider\u2014Porcini\u2014and asked him use his approach to design to help the Korean company to better compete with its rivals\u00a0\u201cHow can we evolve our portfolio to be as meaningful as possible to people and to the business? This is the overall mission.\u201d Porcini asks. \u201cHow can we create the best possible products? What is their identity? How do people interact with them?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a continued bet on design from the Global 500 company, even as cost pressures and new technologies could limit the corporate appetite for expensive human designers.<\/p>\n Porcini could, arguably, be called the most qualified corporate designer in business today. Few others have worked at so many Fortune Global 500 companies: 3M (No. 489), PepsiCo (No. 115), and now Samsung (No. 27).<\/p>\n In 2011, he took over design responsibilities at 3M, where he fought to make aesthetics part of the product process. \u201cIf 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,\u201d he recalls. Porcini went into the field: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy, because it wasn\u2019t in my job description,\u201d he says. \u201cI needed to step on the toes of so many people.\u201d<\/p>\n A year later, PepsiCo tapped him to be its first-ever head of design. \u201cIndustrial designers in tech, historically, focus on the product,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I learned in consumer packaged goods was the importance of the overall experience with the brand.\u201d<\/p>\n Both 3M and PepsiCo gave Porcini an appreciation for what non-designers bring to the conversation. \u201cThe 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Samsung is a return, of sorts, for Porcini. The designer wrote his master\u2019s thesis on wearables, foreseeing how smart clothing and other technologies could become part of daily life even before wireless technologies like Wifi and Bluetooth were standard. And when Porcini brought PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi around the world to look at leaders in design, he made sure to make a stop at Samsung.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe came all the way to Seoul in 2013 to meet the top management of Samsung and really understand how it was investing in design,\u201d he remembers. Porcini highlights two lessons he learned from Samsung: A constant push to reinvent and revitalize its products, and \u201cuniting the entire organization around one design mission.\u201d<\/p>\n That forward-thinking approach can be attributed to late chairman Lee Kun-Hee, who pushed Samsung,\u00a0one of the mega-conglomerates or chaebols <\/em>that dominate South Korea\u2019s economy, to ditch its reputation as a fast follower and compete with the best companies in consumer tech. In his 1993 \u201cFrankfurt Declaration,\u201d Lee urged executives to \u201cchange everything except your wife and children.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLee understood design\u2019s power in digital technology,\u201d says Youngjin Yoo, a professor at the London School of Economics and former Samsung adviser.\u00a0<\/p>\n Samsung designers studied how people interacted with devices; for example, consumers keep their TVs off for most of the day; they\u2019re more like a piece of furniture than a source of entertainment. Samsung treated the television as the centerpiece to a room, a philosophy the company continues today with screens that could pass for art when not in use. (Porcini, during our conversation, points to what looks like a reproduction of Salvador Dali\u2019s \u201cThe Persistence of Memory\u201d behind him. \u201cDid you know that\u2019s a TV?\u201d he says.)<\/p>\n \u201cWhat Samsung did with the Bespoke line of refrigerators [a fully customizable model] and other categories was pretty brave,\u201d Porcini says. \u201cWe need to double down on what the company is already doing, and take it to the next level.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, Samsung is dogged by accusations that it copies its competition. Apple sued Samsung in 2011 for allegedly infringing its design patents; the two giants settled their long legal feud in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yoo thinks the company lost momentum after the 2016 Galaxy Note 7 crisis, when exploding batteries forced a massive recall. \u201cSamsung could have continued to innovate. But I think they stalled in a way,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, Samsung needs to grapple with how to integrate AI into its smart products, which don\u2019t seem quite as smart as they used to in an age of LLMs and AI agents. Yet companies large and small have yet to crack the code on how to make a truly AI-enabled device. Early experiments,\u00a0like the Humane AI pin, have flopped due to high prices and poor performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Samsung is aggressively pushing its AI across its products, with Samsung Electronics co-CEO Roh Tae-moon promising to get its Galaxy AI services onto 800 million mobile devices this year. \u201cWe will apply AI to all products, all functions, and all services as quickly as possible,\u201d he told Reuters in an early January interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI also poses a threat to designers. Generative AI could be a hugely useful tool for creatives, allowing them to mock up and refine ideas much more quickly and at much lower costs. But AI could also automate their work, which could threaten jobs as companies pay closer attention to costs.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s partly why Porcini sees his appointment as Samsung\u2019s chief design officer as a rare bit of good news for corporate design. \u201cWhen I announced my appointment on Linkedin, and I saw hundreds of thousands of impressions \u2026 so many designers around the world saw this as hope,\u201d he says. \u201cI felt the pressure. Now I need to deliver, right?\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps unsurprisingly, he\u2019s optimistic that AI will, in fact, reinforce the value that human designers can bring to companies. \u201cEventually, AI and robots will become a commodity,\u201d he suggests. \u201cTechnology is a tool.\u201d<\/p>\n And \u201cin an age of extreme technology, businesses need the best humans more than ever,\u201d he says. \u201cDesigners 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #worlds #qualified #chief #design #officer #calls #Samsung #dream #job<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mauro Porcini, Samsung Electro… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[268,581,1088,1530,4752,635,1424,7615,506,4224,5916],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A career of firsts<\/strong><\/h2>\n
A return to tech roots<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Design\u2019s value in the age of AI<\/strong><\/h2>\n