AI is redefining how products are both built and experienced, and Samsung is reimagining its place in the tech ecosystem. As Milan Design Week gets underway, Samsung’s president and chief design officer Mauro Porcini pulls back the curtain on the company’s new design manifesto, gets candid about their rivalry with Apple, and shares why a brand known for engineering dominance is now betting its future on something far harder to measure: how a product makes you feel.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
As an Italian in American business, and as a designer working with businesspeople, you’ve always been a little bit of an outsider in some ways in the communities you’re in. Now, as you get to Seoul and you’re the first non-Korean president in Samsung’s history, how much of being an outsider is good or bad? And how do you impact the culture without alienating the people who built it?
This idea of being suspended between different worlds — I grew up in Italy, in the north of Italy, with parents from the south, at a moment in time in Italy when the south and the north were really divided. I would go around my neighborhood, and it was clear that I did not belong there. But then when I went to the south on vacation during the summer, I for sure did not belong there either. So already then, when I was a child, I lived in this gray area, suspended between different identities. If you talk to the design world, often they’re like, “Well, but you’re a businessperson.” But then if you talk to the business world, they are totally like, “You are not one of us.” So you don’t belong there either. Often people are uncomfortable when they don’t have a specific label, when they don’t belong.
The message I want to send, especially to the new generations of people who are trying to define their identity, is that often in those gray areas, you can design your own identity and be unique and original. Already, when I moved as an Italian to the United States, there were many things that I didn’t understand. They were alien to me. They were weird to me, honestly. But you need to really analyze yourself, analyze the culture you’re facing, and understand what unique strengths you bring to the table. Here, it’s a culture that is very organized. There is this vision coming from the top, and then an army of people that can execute. If used in the right ways, it’s very powerful, because they are able to move really quickly.
Obviously, I was called to bring in a vision that adds to the one the company already had in design. So I really spent the past year trying to understand the strengths of the company and how I can bring something different. I’m still in the middle of it. I think you need to be very transparent about the fact that you will have missteps and make mistakes. But again, you also need to show as much as possible what you bring to the table.
I’ve seen commentaries on LinkedIn from designers talking about your move to Samsung and kind of finding hope in it. I’m curious what that hope is referring to.
Look, I was surprised by those comments too. Design in corporations is somehow struggling. The design community made huge promises in the first decade of this new millennium about the power of design thinking, and then in many instances, design thinking didn’t deliver. Design thinking is important because you need a methodology, you need a process, you need tools, exactly like a painter needs a brush. But then you need the right painter. You need Picasso, because if you give that brush to Picasso, you get something. If you give that brush to my accountant or my kid, you’re going to get something different. Instead, our design community talked too much about the brush, the bristles, the material, and how to design the brush. We forgot that, at the end of the day, what really makes the difference is the thinking of the design thinkers. Do we have the right empathy? Do we read the right signals? Do we have the right intuition? To innovate, you need the tool, you need design thinking, but you also need the right people with the right mindset.
You’ve been at Samsung about a year, and you’re announcing this design manifesto for Samsung’s future this week as part of Milan Design Week. So can you give us a taste of that and how that came together?
The pillar of what we’re doing with design at Samsung is really making sure that designers are the voice of humanity in the organization. I identified four different territories, four categories we need to focus on. The first one is what I call live longer. Then there is live better, live loud, and live on. Longer means all those technologies, most of them wearable technologies, that we have to monitor your body and help you with your physical and mental well-being. Then there are all those technologies that are there for your safety — the safety of yourself, your loved ones, your pet, your home, your belongings. The second one, live better, is all about using technology to free up time to do what you love most. That dimension is literally about using robots and AI to increase the productivity of what you do, or ideally to do things on your behalf so that you can be free of technology and do whatever you want. With or without technology is up to you. It’s your choice.
The third dimension, live loud, is the world of creativity and self-expression. It’s about using technology to express yourself. It could go from creating content for social media all the way to, for instance, creating your startup from the comfort of your living room using those technologies. Then the fourth dimension is what we call live on. It’s about transcending yourself and preserving memories. We are saving pictures and videos of the people we love. I have thousands and thousands of pictures and videos of my family members, and I have almost nothing of, for instance, my grandparents, especially when they were kids. So already today, when people are not with us, either because they are on another side of the world or maybe because they’re not with us in this world anymore, we can preserve their memories, their emotions, their knowledge.
But more than ever now, with AI, we can literally build digital twins of people. It will happen organically, because the more we share everything we do with AI devices and AI platforms, the more these platforms will learn about us and will be able to replicate us in some form. My parents are in their 80s. I hope they’re going to live for the next 50 years, but when they’re not with me anymore, if I have a moment of difficulty, I would love to have the possibility to ask my dad, “What would you do if you were me?” In all of this, you see that the technology is just a tool. It is at the service of humanity.
When you come up with these four areas, to what extent do you start with, like, “Here are the products we have now, and we have to serve them,” versus, “Here are the questions, and how do I move the products into them?”
There are three horizons that we’re considering. One is the short horizon. You start from the products of today and try to advance them in an incremental way, even though, obviously, you always try to figure out if there is something breakthrough that you can implement quickly. Then there is a second horizon, where I need to figure out how I can do something that is more radical. But the area where the four categories apply the most is the long-term horizon. This is where you define the future portfolio of the company. There are products that maybe in the future won’t exist anymore, because robots will do a lot of things that other devices do today. So those devices will need to evolve, need to be redesigned. Let’s say in 10 years’ time, in a house where you have multiple kinds of robots — humanoids, utilitarian robots, and robots that are more about emotional companionship — our appliances will change. The robot will be the main interface between you and some of these appliances.
If AI is going to be in your house, how will your TV, your refrigerator, your speakers evolve? What will be their role? What will be the shape of these devices? Where will they be placed? Then you go back to today and start to influence the development of those products in that direction. This is influencing, by the way, eventually strategies of acquisitions, partnerships, or research that you can do.
