Samsung has one of the largest product line ups of any tech model, but in the case of design, it’s persistently seen as an “also-ran.” Whereas different firms have cast distinctive and immediately recognizable design languages, reminiscent of Nothing, Samsung has discovered itself behind within the model stakes. If you’ve obtained Apple as one in every of your greatest rivals, that’s not an incredible place to be in.
That’s to not say there haven’t been enhancements within the final decade, and the occasional flashes of promise—most notable in its collaborations with exterior designers, just like the Bouroullec brothers, who normal the Serif TV for the South Korean firm. However that hasn’t stopped complaints of boring and unoriginal design, each internally and externally, and an inertia when it has led, leaving different firms to shut the hole.
Being outlined by efficiency over persona has hardly achieved Samsung’s backside line any hurt—it not too long ago regained its lead from Apple in world smartphone market share and has been the world chief in TVs for nearly twenty years. However, in 2025, it appears to be like there’s lastly a transparent need from Samsung to bridge the hole between kind and performance, by giving design the main focus it’s been missing for a lot too lengthy on the firm.
Again in April, Samsung employed Mauro Porcini, its first ever chief design officer. Porcini has spent greater than 20 years constructing award-winning design groups at 3M and PepsiCo, most not too long ago main a profitable world rebrand for Pepsi—the corporate’s first in 14 years.
For a corporation as large as Samsung, this rent feels late. Apple created the identical place for Jony Ive a decade in the past, across the similar time it was reported that innovation at Samsung was being stifled beneath layers of administration. With these structural points supposedly unpicked, Samsung now has work to do—one thing Porcini is eager to acknowledge.
Late to the Social gathering
“We’re in a second of change, the place the best way folks work together with any form of machine or digital system goes to be radically completely different within the coming years,” Porcini tells me. “These machines will change the best way folks reside, work, and join with one another—the best way folks fulfil their wants. For a corporation like Samsung, having design on the prime, concerned in the best way you outline the way forward for the portfolio based mostly on these wants—it’s extra essential than ever.”
The march of AI is, in fact, a useful hook upon which to tie this lengthy overdue transfer, however Yves Béhar, the founder and principal designer at Fuseproject who labored with Samsung on The Body TV, tells me this has been years within the making, and one thing Samsung had initially appeared externally to assist put the wheels in movement.
“After we began working with Samsung on The Body [released in January 2017], the CEO on the time, HS Kim, got here to us and mentioned—look, we need to remodel ourselves from a shopper expertise firm, into an expertise enterprise,” says Béhar. “So we helped them set some ideas round that, and labored on getting that message out into the enterprise—of what it means to consider expertise versus tech. That is precisely what we did with The Body TV.”
