Welcome to another episode of Lixel Facets of Design. This is a podcast brought to you by Lixel Global Design. I'm the host, Paul Flowers. I'm the chief design and brand identity officer of Lixel. It's a really exciting week for us annually. We come to where we are today, which is in Milan for Milan Design Week. And it's a really exciting week because we get to showcase our brand, one of our brands in the portfolio, of course, Grower Spa. So, an amazing creative week. Our design team are here. We're trend hunting, where we're interacting with architects, designers, and creatives from all over the world, gaining insights that we use for fuel throughout the whole year. So, it's a really exciting time for us. And that's why we're having and we're filming the podcast this year from here.
And I've got a really, really exciting guest on today, and it's somebody that I've known for a long time. I've worked in similar companies to him, like Philips. We've been judges at the Design Business Association for the Design Effectiveness Awards, and I've got to know this individual over time. And I've got to also watch his progression and how his career progression has really helped so many creatives to elevate their positions in companies. And our guest today is going to take you on a journey and give us amazing insights into his career, into his education choices. So, I'm really excited to introduce to you Mauro Porcini. I think many of the creators are going to know you anyway, but Mauro, perhaps you could just give a little brief introduction about yourself.
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure in this incredible location. You chose really a dream place in Milan. It's not easy, and then you put together an incredibly inspiring exhibition. So, congratulations. Thanks for having me. I'm Mauro Porcini. I'm Italian, so I'm home here, even though right now I live in Korea, in the Far East.
I used to live in America for many years, 15 years. I'm currently the chief design officer of Samsung, a position that I took about a year ago. I've been for 13 years the chief design officer of PepsiCo in a completely different industry. Before that, I was the chief design officer of 3M, but with a different kind of take compared to Samsung. I started in Philips, as you said, and I had a few years my own agency, trying to figure out how to be entrepreneurial as well in the world of tech. So that's my journey in a few seconds.
Amazing. Well, let's start at the absolute beginning. So, I know you studied at the Politecnico di Milano, but before we even get into your education, what initially sparked that creative, inquisitive element of your character that made you think, 'I want to do something that's more creative and expressive'?
Well, you know, not just thinking about myself. I have young kids right now. One is four, and actually she's turning four today. Today is her birthday. Thank you on your behalf. And then the other one is one year and a half. So I'm there even just with them, observing them, trying to understand how much of this is DNA and how much of this is going to be education. You know, because as a father, I feel the weight of trying to inspire them and educate them at the best of my possibilities. And so if I think about my childhood, I think there was a little bit of DNA, like for everybody, there was a little bit of creativity inside myself. But then I owe a lot, a lot to my parents. I always talk about them, even when they don't ask the direct question. My parents told me three things that later on in life I understood that were really, really important in my journey. The first one was this passion for culture.
They literally, literally loved culture. I remember in television, instead of being excited by celebrities, singers, you know, the typical kind of celebrities you get excited about, they were excited by people that were really good at talking, very eloquent people, and that had the depth of thinking. And they were not celebrating this explicitly. They were just in awe for these people. So I thought that was amazing. You know, these people must be amazing. So I grew up with that kind of idea. And my mother was writing; she loved literature, and my father was an architect but in love with art. So they were really knowledgeable about all the world. So for them, culture, culture, culture. The second thing was kindness, and it has nothing to do with your question, but it became very important in my journey as a creative and as a leader of thousands of people in my organizations: this idea of being a good person and loving and selflessly loving people around you. And then the third thing was the passion for what they were doing. So both of them were doing jobs they didn't like. My mom, she couldn't go to university, even though again she loved culture, because her family didn't have the financial means to send her to university. And so she went straight to work in different kinds of corporate offices, and she was working essentially in finance in these corporate offices, and she hated it because she was a humanistic kind of person. So she left her job at 38, not a penny. You know, we're not a wealthy family. We didn't have a lot of money, but she left it anyway. And since then, I remember as a child, she started to write poems and all kinds of thoughts. And still today, she keeps writing in her 80s. My father was an architect, but not a successful one. So he ended up, you know, doing some projects here and there, but mostly teaching in high school technical drawing. He didn't really like that. He was painting every single day. Why I mention this? For me, passion in what you do as a creative, or anyway in any kind of profession, is vital. It's critical. It's very important if you want to do something interesting. And as well, it's important because you spend most of your life working. So you better do something that you really love.
And they told me that kind of passion. And they told me also that I'm very privileged because I can have that passion align and combine with what I do as a job. But even for people listening to us right now that eventually don't have a job that they like, maybe you know you work in a factory and you don't like the job, or you drive a cab and it's not your dream job. But even in the case, like in the case of my parents, you can still find in your heart, in your mind, the inspiration to do things that you really love, and it can change your life for the better. So I thank my parents. I do it today. I do it all the time. I can.
Yeah, that's kind of like the Japanese concept of ikigai. Yes, you know, of really finding something that you're passionate about, but also brings value to society, but also pays a living as well. It's those combination of those things. If you can bring them together, it's real fulfillment and purpose. That's beautiful. And so obviously, having that real creative family background that's conducive to creativity and also intellectually, it's like because when we talk about creativity, particularly on facets of design, we're not just talking about traditional just drawing or sketching. We're talking about creativity in general, whether that's poetry, whether that's communication, which is a form of creativity, of course. And so growing up in that environment, I guess, has kind of led you, I guess, organically towards the creative subject. So what did you study in Milan and in the Politecnico?
Look, growing with those kinds of parents, and because those passions became also my passions, and I started to be really good at doing these things. So I was really good at writing. I loved literature, philosophy, and I was good at painting, and I loved art in all forms and facets. So you never know if you become good because early on you're exposed to it, or it was just, you know, technically you are just inclined to that, and that's why you became even more inspired by that. But long story short, I wanted to be a writer or eventually an artist. And my parents told me, look, it's going to be very, very hard to have a living, you know, to earn enough in those two fields, especially back then in Italy. And so they told me, could you choose a university that maybe, you know, it's already an effort for them, was an effort to send me to university. So I chose architecture. There was anyway a passion. And then a few days before doing the test to enter the university, there was a closed number of people that could enter. A friend of mine from my school calls me, and he told me, look, there is this new faculty called Disegno Industriale, industrial design. Now in English it sounds different than in Italian because in English design has a specific kind of meaning. In fact, we use the English word in Italian as well. But they decided back then, in the name of the Italian language, to translate it in Italian. So it was disegno. This in Italian means drawing. Industrial. And so it was within architecture, but it was new. And so the idea was that there were going to be many more opportunities to work. There was this balance between design on one side, which was creativity, and industrial on the other side, which was commerce. So I was like, okay, this could be an interesting one to try. I studied a little bit what this was about. But in truth, I had no clue of what that really meant. I did a test. It went incredibly well. I was number one out of thousands of people. I got the number one position. So I was like, oh, maybe that's my future. And I decided to go. And I knew if it was going wrong, I would have moved to architecture, which was part of Politecnico, same university. So that's how everything started, completely by coincidence, not knowing at all what I was going to study. And then I realized what that was. That was not the design of industrial machines, you know, that could produce stuff, but it was the furniture my father was in love with, it was the lighting my father was in love with, the clothing, you know, that even if he didn't have much money, they were always very elegant in the way they were dressing themselves. It was paying attention to details. It was, at the end of the day, I realized later on, all about understanding people, humans, understanding their needs, but also understanding their dreams, their aspirations, and then inventing, literally, because the beginning is literally invention, even before you start to design, inventing a solution for those needs, those wants, those dreams. Now this solution could be a chair, it could be a telephone, it could be lighting, it could be a brand, it could be an experience, it could be a story, it could be many different things. In those years in Politecnico, I learned once again, no matter I was studying industrial design, that design could be applied to essentially everything. You know, I remember Manzini, this incredible professor teaching service design. We're talking about experience design. Politecnico was pretty advanced in the 90s in taking design beyond the traditional application to products. And so I fell in love with something I didn't know you could study, something I didn't know existed in school. And still today, I'm sure you have the same kind of experience. There are millions and millions and millions of people out there, especially kids in high school, that have no clue that you can learn something so cool, so fun, so creative. Essentially, design is nothing else. At the school of innovation, they teach you to innovate with a very human-centered approach. But there is no other school in the world, business school, science, engineering. There is no other school.
I think that's why it's so difficult, isn't it, to articulate what design is, because it's such a widely used word, and it should be, because it does encompass everything that humans interact with. And I had exactly the same experience, by the way. I remember going, I graduated in '96, went to university in '92 into Newcastle, and I remember explaining to my family what industrial design was, that it wasn't designing the tooling machines or a lathe or these objects that make things that are industrial. And I still didn't really understand what it was, but I was kind of a bit more advanced than them. You knew more than me, a little bit, but still nobody. And so you say you're studying industrial design, nobody understood. And I think that's probably a terrible name for what we did, because, and fortunately, and we'll get into this later when we talk about this human-centricity and connection and those things, but design has really, I think, and good design, great design, is developing into a concept where it really understands that it's there to serve humanity, it's there to serve individuals, it's there to create connection. It's there to create all of these elements that incrementally make the days of people better every day. And I say this every podcast because it's the thing I'm most proud of in the world, is that our products that we've designed, that we create as a company, that they're used by one billion people every single day. You know, and if a person can wake up in the morning and start with a shower that makes them feel good, maybe they're kinder to somebody else. Maybe they're kinder to their family. Maybe all of these elements are responsibilities, but we can translate through design. We can create experiences that could really propel people to have better experiences, not just at the moment of the interaction with the product, but throughout their day. And hopefully that baton passes on then to maybe some of the brands that you've worked with, by the products that they commute in, by the products that they use, whether that's, I know you do everything from telephones at Samsung, of course, to televisions, but all of those products are almost like batons that they can transfer this positive experience. And hopefully, and we're getting into this consumer-centricity after, but hopefully if people are more consumer-centric and realize that our job, and architecture also, by the way, for people who watch and listen to our podcast, we talk about that a lot. Architecture serving human beings, not landscape, but actually how we navigate and how we use them, and to uplift society.
Well, to do that, I think as a creative community, we have a big responsibility and a big opportunity. We need to realize that the responsibility and the opportunity is the one of making sure that our primary goal is not to sell more products, because that's why we have business leaders. For our goal is to be the voice of humanity in these companies, in the business world. Our goal is to put people at the center of everything. Our goal is to make sure that people in their journey from when they wake up to when they go to sleep, in their journey through life, or when they are born to when they're ready to move on to another dimension, they are supported through an ecosystem of products, experiences that were designed. We care for them. You know, we love really trying to do the right thing, then considering, oh, by the way, I work for a company, so I need to figure out how to sell it, how to make it financially, you know, viable, profitable. And by the way, even that dimension that is a financial and business dimension, there is an ethical dimension in that too. The more successful you are financially, the more you create something at a price that is affordable for people, the more you will access, you know, the more people you will access, and the more you were talking about billions of people. If your good idea creating value for them arrive to billions and billions of people around the world, then you can really collectively, progressively change the world for the better. So even in the business dimension that often for us creatives is something, oh my God, I really need to do it, but even that is important for a huge impact.
Absolutely. You just mentioned the word, well, the words design community. So, you know, that's the very reason why we set up this podcast, because with facets of design, we wanted to bring different creative disciplines together and to really inspire and to show individuals, and whether they are already in creativity or thinking of a career or coming in, or people just wanting to inspire their children. We want them to listen and watch the podcast and see individuals like yourself who very kindly, generously give up their time to move into this concept of creative community. And we're doing things like we have a Pinterest site that we put up for free. We want everybody, we're not trying to hide stuff away. We're trying to share stuff. We want other designers and architects and students to use our Pinterest site and to get inspiration. And we try to do talks, and our team are judges on design competitions, trying to put back into creativity. We lecture at universities. So, we're trying to get our team to really create this creative community, because like you said, it's a shared responsibility we have. And if we can transition and work a bit closer together, and I know sometimes the brands are in competition and things, but if we can work closer together, I think that human transition from those experiences and environments, I feel, could get better.
I'm completely with you. You know, the name of our exhibit here in Milan Design Week is 'Design is an Act of Love.' And before anything else, before being an exhibit that supports our Samsung brand and we stage our vision for the future through a series of products and concepts for the future. But before all of this, this is a call to action to all designers of the world, including, you mentioned it earlier, our competitors, to really leverage design and our culture as the voice of humanity in these companies and in the business world. In our context, this is more critical than ever because we are dealing with a new form of intelligence that is not human at all. It's called artificial intelligence. And this intelligence can be amazing or can be concerning and dangerous. Many people are excited. Many others are really concerned about what that intelligence could do. And the question is not about should we do it or not. AI, yes or not. Robots, yes or not. Technology in general, yes or not. The answer is yes. We need them. The conversation should be about what's behind this. What drives them? How you design them? How you make sure that they're tamed? At the service of humans. How do you make sure, once again, that design is an act of love, that you put human first, that you educate this new technology in its infancy to be really good. The same work that my parents did, you know, or they tried to do at their best with me. The same work that I'm trying to do at my best with my kids. How do we direct technology in the right way? And once again, technology, because we are in a moment of crossroads, but this is true for any kind of industry and product category. How do we use this care for people to drive our innovation machine? And now we collectively unite as a creative community to drive that. That's really something.
And I think, like you say, we're at the beginnings of a technology that we've never had access to before. And I think as a technology that we have a shared responsibility to work out how that's going to evolve, that can't be left in the hands of a few people. I think, and I do think, creatives really have an opportunity because of the way we think. I think one of our greatest gifts is that we can think in a context that doesn't exist. And I often talk about this, but it's one of the greatest gifts of a designer. We can see opportunity and we can visualize that opportunity and take people along in a room on a journey with us just by being able to articulate or to visualize what that new context could be. And we need that more than ever. We need to understand what the context will be for new technologies like AI. But I'm going to stop you because we're going to come back to AI and do a deeper dive. I want to just...
Can I say one thing that hopefully and probably is not what you're going to ask me later? You're so eloquent, and I think, you know, I'm able also to storytell in a decent way. Designers need right now to be able not just to do things but to share things as well, and storytelling. Understanding our audiences that go from the user that use our products to the customers and the retailers that buy our products and distribute our products, all the way to the business leaders that we need to convince and inspire with what we do. So, I'm sure there are many people that are studying right now and they're trying to figure out what they want to do in life, or maybe they're already designers and they're at the beginning of their careers. Practice the art of storytelling. Understand how important it is in any kind of form and situation. Both you and I, you know, probably right now we're very comfortable in front of a mic and a camera, but it didn't come easily. Like, you know, maybe we're, you know, particularly inclined because we're particularly social. There are people that maybe are a little bit more shy, but you need to practice. It's a skill you can learn.
I think that's a really important message because maybe people see you and they see how eloquent you are and good at presenting and just say, 'Oh, he has a gift.' Not to realize, 'No, that's hard work. It's like anything else. You've probably had to practice so many times.' And I think if people understand how hard you have to practice to do that, it's more obtainable for them. It's not like it's a defined gift that they don't have so they can't do. It's a skill that they must learn. And I think it's important, right? I wrote a book, 'The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People.' In the book, I talk about these 24 different skills of these ideal innovators that I call the unicorns. One of them is this, the ability to storytell. They talk different languages, the language of design, of business, of technology, and storytellers. But at a certain point, there is a chapter about this, about education. Many, many, many times I've been asked, but are these 24 skills something you are born with or something you learn? And the answer is that there are people who are more inclined to certain things than others. You know, think about sports. There are people who are really good at certain sports, tennis, soccer, and people who are less so. The first thing that we need to do is to build awareness about what are those very important skills, 24 skills. There are some that in design they tell us you are really important. You need to be imaginative and creative. You need to be able to translate those dreams and those visions into something. So you need to be very manual and understand your craft and so on and so forth. There are many other characteristics that nobody ever talks about. The importance of kindness, optimism. Today we talk about storytelling. So the first point is we need education, it's important to build awareness about what is important. The second thing is that once you're aware that you need to practice, for instance, storytelling, then by practicing it you get better. So if you were born with, you know, very good at soccer, if you don't practice, your talent is wasted. If you are born that you're not really good, if you practice really, really hard, there is a good probability you're going to have, you know, a say in the world. And again, so practicing a skill, once you learn that kind of skill, don't stop, because you never learn all these skills to the perfection. And so life is a never-ending journey to keep growing and perfecting yourself. I'm seeing this for the people that maybe made it, you know, now they're successful, they have great businesses, great practices, and many of them stop learning. They fall in the trap of arrogance. They're like, 'Okay, I made it. I know it,' and you stop growing, and this is the worst mistake you can do.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's quite interesting you talk about communication. And I was thinking back to university and, you know, and the roots of that communication skill. And one of the things they did at Newcastle, which I always thought was incredibly valuable if brutal, was we would have critiques. So all of the designers would work on their projects, they would put them out on display, and then you would have a critique with your peers and the lecturers, and it was brutal. If you designed something that you didn't think of a particular user case scenario or something, you know, people would openly tell you, and we were all trained to be open and honest and critique the work, and it built muscles. It also built resilience because I think as an entrepreneur, as a creative, as an innovator, you have to be resilient. So it taught people how to not take things too personally. It taught people to listen because we have two ears and one mouth, and to listen more is to learn more. So it really produced a skill set. Also, you had to, part of that skill set, you had to stand up and present. And so just honing that skill of presenting, because a lot, the thing I think at a high level in design, when I speak to design leaders, it's really important in design because often when you're selling a concept, the future, you really are doing that. You're asking the business to come along on an unproven journey. Maybe you can't prove the ROI on a particular thing, but you have to have that skill set for them to be confident in you and your team and the idea that they're willing to move in a direction that's unproven, and that's innovation. And to convince people to come on that journey with you is a skill in itself. You could have the best design in the world, and I've seen that in many, many places around the world, beautiful concepts, but they stay in the drawer. And I think we need to definitely get designers to hone those skills of communication and how to present so that they can convince people to invest in these concepts, to invest in the future in this way.
What, by the way, you were talking about critiquing and being able to receive the feedback, having that kind of confidence and muscles and resilience. And there is another thing that is very, very important. And you know, this is so important not just at school, obviously, but in a company, in a team, in an agency, everywhere you produce work with others. But the other complementary skill that you need for something like this is the kindness I was talking about earlier, because, you know, we're all humans, and in a working environment where there is your boss and maybe you're all competing for the next job and next position, you want to shine in front of others. If you're not a kind person, if you don't care for the others, and therefore if you don't have a positive intent, it's very difficult to have that kind of critique, transparent mindset, approach, ways of working. So kindness is really, really, really important to build the right vibe, the right synergy, the right interaction, and then people that share the same dream. So having people that are motivated, that embrace your dream, that want to be part of it, that understand that their job is not about delivering a result for the end of the year because this is your brief, is your performance review, but they're there because they want to change the world, because they want to go after the kind of dream. If you combine that confidence you were talking about earlier with positive intent driven by empathy and kindness, with this passion driven by the dream, you know, something you want to change collectively together, and therefore you understand that you cannot do it by yourself. You need others to do it. That's what builds, those are a few of the ingredients that you need, more, but a few of the ingredients that build a great team. And many times companies, big or small, don't have something like this. And when you're lucky enough, like in my case, in many years I built teams from scratch, built it keeping in mind what are the important skills. They're not just the hard skills, you need the soft skills as well. And when instead you are part of a team that you didn't build, you know, it's very, very important you remind everybody all the time, no matter if you're the boss or you are part of the team, a member of the team, what are the important values, and you call out the wrong behaviors, and you try to move the culture of the team in the right direction.
Absolutely. That's really good. That's kind of just made me reflect on something just you talking there. But I remember when I became the chief design officer of Grower in 2005, you know, we embarked on this journey and we created some amazing, amazing products, and they were innovative. They started to win some design awards, and the team, we felt really good. But actually a few years on, I realized whilst I was proud of that achievement and what the team had created, it was only about another five years on that I realized, and it's the thing I'm most proud of now, and I really look and strive for, I'd created a creative culture in the organization. And that's very different to having amazing products. The organization and Grower and Grower Spa today, I would say they are a design-mature organization. There is a culture of innovation and design at Grower, which is incredible, but that's something that takes years, and it's like osmosis with the kindness and empathy, I think, because when you start to have kindness and empathy in a team, you reject people who come into the team who don't have that, and all of a sudden the team builds its own momentum and culture that resonates through the organization, and then I think you have something that's truly, it's beautiful, it's sustainable. But it transcends an individual, you know, so if I'm not there, it's irrelevant. It's because the culture is there and that's running through the organization. And I think, yeah, often it's not talked about. We'll get on to the emotional side of those things, but that empathy and kindness. I say it to my children. I just commissioned some artwork for my daughters, and it says, 'Be kind, be curious, and be you.' And it says exactly that thing. It's about, you know, being kind to others is really, really important. And then be curious always. You don't have to take no for an answer. You can be respectful when people say no, but you can ask why and you can push. And the most important thing, especially with young children, I have two young daughters, is about having self-confidence and being you. And I think that goes for organizations, that humanity is in everything. And if your team can start to push that into the organization, which I know you've done at 3M, I know you did that at PepsiCo. We're going to get into those a bit as well. I want to get into this now, but so, yeah, one hundred percent agree with you about the empathy part. It's a really important part in the kindness. I just want to ask you because having you here, and it's a topic I haven't really discussed so much with our audience on the podcast, but I know that you've, I would say you are super international, of course, and I know you've lived all over the world, in America and Korea, and we want to talk, and you were born in Italy, and I know you traveled so much, you know, and myself also, you know, I lived away from the UK for sixteen years. I lived in the Netherlands working for Philips. I lived in Italy, Designichi...
for the new Rex and Electrolux, the big brand. So I lived in Italy for a few years and then I lived in Germany for almost a decade where my daughters were born and I learned so many lessons and through all my travels about culture and how important that is. And one of the biggest lessons actually was empathy. It was about an understanding that before yourself, you know, putting the needs and let's say desires of other people and letting those insights rise up. And I just wanted to ask you, having all of this international travel that you have and you've been and lived in different countries, to people watching this, how important would you say to young designers? Would you say travel, leave your own country, go and experience something else, experience cultures? How important is that?
