Hello everybody. Lovely to see so many of you here. My name's Ben. I'm co-founder of Dezeen, the online architecture and design publication. And it's my great pleasure to be here at Samsung's 'Design Is an Act of Love' exhibition to have what I am sure will be a fascinating conversation with Mauro Porcini. For those that don't know Mauro, Mauro has had a distinguished career putting design at the heart of some of the world's largest corporations, putting kind of design thinking into the fabric of their business strategy. Most recently at Samsung, he was appointed to the chief design officer role, the first time such a role existed at Samsung last year. So I think it's fair to say that this exhibition is one of the first kind of manifestations of your kind of direction and leadership at Samsung. It also marks the start of a new journey, a new design strategy, maybe even more of a manifesto that will set the direction for Samsung in the years ahead.
So to kick things off, Mauro, I'm going to ask you a simple question, but it's quite a big question. Tell us about this new strategy. What is it and what is it set out to achieve?
So, first of all, thank you for being here today and hosting this event. Thanks everybody for being here. I know that this week is intense. You're all busy. You have busy lives and it's an incredible week in Milan these days. So, I don't take for granted the fact that you decided to be here and not somewhere else today.
What's behind this idea of 'Design Is an Act of Love', this exhibit and our philosophy, what we're trying to do right now? Look, I was born in 1975, I'm turning 51 this year. I grew up in the 80s, the 90s, and those years were years of excitement, of optimism. I'm Italian, I was becoming part of this new community called the European community. The euro was starting in the design world. The fashion brands were starting to become global phenomenon. Think of Armani, Prada, Gucci. We will start to talk about experience design in a completely different way. Think of Fujimoto in those years or Alessi. Where Europe again, optimism, internet was arriving, globalization was starting. So we were living with this kind of energy.
Fast forward to today and this situation is slightly different. On one side there is so much going on. You know, from a science standpoint there are so many progresses. The world is becoming global in so many ways. This globalization is creating a lot of awareness in many different regions of the world. There are new phenomenon like K-pop. You know, I've been living one year in Korea and it was fascinating to observe these global trends, this global approach to music melting and twisting and blending with a unique Korean twist to this kind of phenomenon. In the meantime though, there is a lot of things that are kind of unstable. You know, we live in this incredible instability from a social standpoint, a financial standpoint, a political standpoint. We open social media and there is so much hate and there is conflicts and people against each other. I have a four years old today, she's turning today, four years, Beatrice my daughter, and I have one year and a half old, and I don't know, you know, how they're going to grow surrounded by so much negativity in so many different ways or at least a lot of instability.
And then layer technology on top of it. I work in a technological company. Today we talk about technology. Technology is about to transform everything: the way we live, the way we work, interact with each other, connect with life and with other people. And on one side there is a lot of excitement. Think about artificial intelligence, robotics and the potential of all of this for all of us. On the other side there is a lot of concerns as well. Will AI erode human qualities? Will AI eventually lead us to the annihilation of the human species? Or there is some certainty AI will steal a lot of the jobs we have today. Maybe not our jobs, you know, at least, you know, at my age probably we're kind of safe. But I don't know if my kids will work, if the idea of working as it is today is still happening, is still going to happen in 20 years. What I know for sure is that they're going to have robots in their home, robots that will clean their floors. They will have done cooking. They will change completely. They interact with the home. Their home will look very different. They won't drive cars unless they want to have fun driving cars. So they will live in a reality very different.
So now in all of this, therefore, we have today a great responsibility because all of us, designers, non-designers, business leaders, culture creators, influencers, all of us, we are designing today the future. We are designing the world our kids, the new generations, we live in in few years. And so this is really exciting, it's an incredible opportunity, but once again it's also a great responsibility. And this is why we talk of love, you know, in a world where artificial intelligence, robotics, technology can go in one direction or in the opposite, the question is not AI yes or not, the question is not robots yes or not. The question is what there is behind all of these. These are just tools.
A journalist the other day asked me, 'Oh, but this is so much technology around and you know we have these people, for instance there are these men, they wake up and the first thing they do instead of giving a kiss to their wives, they check the phone.' They check... that's what she does. I'm sorry, Karim. They check the phone. And my answer was, but is the fault of the technology and the phone or is the fault of the person, of the man or the woman, whatever it is? Are we talking about, you know, technology changing behaviors or the fact that we are losing our moral compass? We're losing perspective. We're forgetting that what we should talk about is love, is the values that we have, is sharing, caring for others. That's the problem.
And so in a world where technology will develop no matter what we do, the conversation shouldn't be about technology yes or not, but it should be about again what are the values, the foundational values that should direct innovation, design of the technology in the future. By the way, if we shift the conversation in this direction, this is great for society beyond technology because if you look at racism and conflict and many of the problems we have in our society today, they all go back to this lack of empathy and care and generosity and love that we have for each other. So 'Design Is an Act of Love' is today, more than Samsung, more than technology, is a call to action to all the creatives of the world to remember that design, innovation started as an act of love and we should go back to that in a moment where artificial intelligence could lead humanity in this world in one direction or the other.
We should go back to 3.3 million years ago when a woman or a man, God knows who he was, decided for the first time to take something that was available in nature and modify nature. Take two stones, scratch them one with the other and create the first tool. That tool was used back then to protect themselves, to hunt, to prepare food. Later on they started to develop objects and tools to decorate their bodies, to connect with each other, to express themselves. Later on they started to create things to celebrate the gods, statues, painting the caves.
Thousands of years later Maslow codified all these things in a pyramid. The hierarchy of needs. Those tools were about the base of the Maslow pyramid: safety, physiological needs. In the middle was about self-expression. It was about connecting with others. And then the top: purpose, meaning, meaning of life, transcendence. So that's how we started design and innovation, solving needs for ourselves and for the people around us. It was by definition an act of care, generosity, love for us and for the community close to us.
At a certain point we were like, you know what, I'm so good at creating this tool for hunting. Why don't you do the one for preparing the food and you do the one for decorating the body and you do the one for decorating the caves? We started to specialize ourselves and in this specialization we needed to figure out how to exchange these things and so we invented barter and then later on currency and then we organized ourselves in corporations. We became artisans and then the agricultural revolution arrived and we had the land and then we built later on what we call today companies and brands.
At a certain point we totally lost the initial purpose of innovation and design. It was all about caring for each other, helping each other. We invented the idea of work. We organized ourselves in cities to help each other. And we lost that and we started to confuse that with the idea of fame, power, money. You open social media today and these kids are bombarded with the idea that success is material success, that success is fame, is money. And this is such a delusion. It's such a disservice for new generations because the few that will get there, and there are very few, will realize that if you don't have the love we talk about here, if you don't have foundational values that we talk about here, you'll be miserable. You'll be depressed, unhappy.
So we need to tell young people, new generations actually, love, care for each other, this is what is important in life because what is important in life is happiness at the end of the day and happiness is nothing else than doing everything Maslow told us to do. When you do all of this with the right balance you reach what we call happiness and again love is a driver for this.
So I started very high, you know, this conversation, but all of this to say for me this is very personal. It's not tech, it's not Samsung, it was the companies I was working for before. It's a responsibility that I feel and I'm sure many of you feel because again we can direct the world in one direction and the other and one of these directions is amazing, but we need to shift the conversation, we need to talk about this kind of values because if we don't, history taught us, if you look at the Roman Empire, if you read about the Greek culture, if you look at many many different kind of cultures and kingdoms and empires over the history, the moment they started to lose the moral values, the ethical compass, it was the beginning of the end.
So, thank you, Mauro. That was my first question. You said there was going to be, you know, too open. But I think what you're talking about there has kind of come together in a manifesto, the human side of technology, putting the human side in. When you talk about love and when you talk about putting kind of humanity in the center of design, in the center of technology, are those kind of similar things? Can you talk a little bit about that human-centeredness? Because I think in an age, especially when you mentioned AI in that, this world, people are kind of worried about losing that. Can you talk about the importance of keeping the human?
Yeah, look, going a little bit more practical and concrete in our world of technology, our portfolio. If you use the Maslow pyramid, I've been using Maslow in every company, every industry I've been working with. I discovered Maslow at school, in high school, and then university. When I joined Samsung with my team, we connected the Maslow pyramid to four different territories that make sense for us. So how do you really concretely, pragmatically help these people in the world of tech with the portfolio that we have? So we identified four categories. We want to help people living longer, living better, living loud and living on.
Living longer is all about those technologies that eventually you wear for your physical and mental health. You know, we are about to see an explosion of wearable devices that you carry with you, devices that will understand your body emotionally and physically in incredible ways and will help you directing your life, bettering your life in the best possible way over time. So there is all these physiological needs if you want, and then there is the safety, safety of your body, technologies in the future that will save literally our lives, safety of your loved ones, of your pets, of your belongings, of your home. So this is all about using technology to live longer.
Live better is all about using technology to be more productive. Eventually using technology to do things on your behalf. So you will have robots and AI that will do work on your behalf or once again when it's a companion working with you it's going to make you more productive and eventually it's going to make that task even more enjoyable. When that happen, what do you do with the free time? You get rid of technology and you enjoy your life. Technology to free you from technology.
So that question from the journalist, oh you take out the phone and you're attached to the phone and now you're even more technology that you become a slave to technology. No, quite the opposite. If you have the right values, if you have the right emotional balance, technology can make you more productive, can free up your time so that you can use that time to go to the beach with your kids, to read a book, to go to the gym. In the future eventually technology will do work for us. Maybe those jobs that you know somebody doesn't want to do, like I don't know, cleaning the floors or driving a cab or working in a factory. There are a series of jobs that humans would prefer eventually not to do even though you know there is absolutely nothing wrong about those jobs, but there are jobs that if machines do them for us, that's amazing. I mean in the 70s, in the 60s, in the past we would dream of a future where robots work for us and then we are free, we are free from work, we can do other things.
Now I'm going to diverge for a second and then I go back to the four categories, but this is something you know very close to my heart in the kind of future. How do we make sure that people are happy when they don't have a job anymore? Because we are totally addicted to the idea that we need a job. If you think about how we build happiness, at the end of my book, there is a chapter of the book that talks about how you design happiness. That by the way was inspired, Stefan, Stefan Sagmeister, by the movie that you made and some of the interviews that you had with some of the human scientists that were in the movie.
But essentially you do three things in life. The first one is you invest in yourself, in your identity, and you start right away when you are a kid. I see my little kids, you know, the personality is very clear and now they're trying to define their personality in these early phases of their lives, it's fascinating. You know, the human brain is incredible and then you go on in life and again it's a journey to define that identity. You get a job and often that job becomes your identity. So the work is used often to define that identity. Now sometimes we make the incredible mistake of defining our identity just through our jobs. And the moment you eventually lose your job, you lose completely your identity. This is one of the biggest mistakes many people do in society today.
But anyway, the first thing is that. The second is loving, is selfless love for people close to you, your family, your friends. There is a Harvard study that shows that actually relationships is the biggest driver of happiness nowadays. So it's selfless love because you give it because you just want to give it. You don't expect anything back. But by definition because of the nature of the community close to you, you're going to get it back and that gives you a lot of satisfaction.
The third dimension often comes later in life and is about giving purpose to your life, is doing something bigger than you. It comes later in life because at a certain point you start to feel maybe unconsciously that you're not eternal. And so this is a way to defeat death. And this could be, you know, inventing incredible products, changing the world with your ideas, but all the way to little acts of kindness in the day-to-day with people that you meet in the streets, becoming immortal because people will remember you as that generous, kind person. So it goes the full spectrum.
Now in the society of today, often in our jobs, we find the three steps of our happiness. So I already said that in the job we find our identity. In the job often we find our friends, we find our significant others or anyway we find a bridge to then find somebody outside, but it's a way to socialize and connect with others. And in the job also we find a purpose for our lives. It happens so many different times. So in a society where we don't have jobs, how do we design happiness? How do we help people? What is the catalyst or connection of giving purpose to people? How do we rethink cities and neighborhoods and communities to guarantee that kind of approach, that kind of happiness?
Anyway, big parenthesis is going back to live longer, better, on better technology to free you from technology. When we'll be free, we need to understand what to do with that freedom. So often we say, you know, the person in the jail, in prison, doesn't want to be freed because they're so used to stay in that beautiful jail and they wouldn't know what to do outside.
The third dimension is live loud. Live loud is all about creativity, human imagination, and so it's all those tools that technology gives you to create something. Now this something could be content for your social media. It could be a startup from the comfort of your living room or anything else in between. It's the creation, the instinct to create that we had millions of years ago when we scratched those two stones together.
Living on is the most critical one that is going to happen. So we really need to manage it. Living on is memory and preserving memories. So we're already doing it today. Pictures, videos. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures and videos. Not just to our family members. The other day we were looking how many pictures we had of Fabiano in our phones. I had thousands of pictures of a friend in my phone, in my personal phone. So it is that, but the reality is that now we use AI in so many ways.
And so AI already now and more and more in the future will know the trips you do, the movies you choose. If you use artificial intelligence as a companion, it will know your philosophy, your feelings. In my case it knows everything about my health data. It knows everything about my dogs. So it knows everything and more and more will know things. So you want it or not, you are training your digital twin. Now this digital twin will survive you no matter if you want it or not. It's going to happen. So the idea is why don't we design this in the right way? Why don't we put the right boundaries to direct it in the right way? Because a lot of people may be really excited by this. I personally am excited.
The way I explain this is my parents are in their 80s. I hope they're going to live 50 more years. The truth is that sooner or later, like anybody else, they won't be with me anymore. But I would love still in the future the possibility when I have a difficult moment to ask my dad what would you do if you were me in this moment or ask my mom what was the carrot cake recipe that you were doing when I was a kid, to do for in 50 years to my grandchildren. So I would love that kind of connection and I'm sure, I'm sure actually I know that my parents would love that.
The biggest worry of my mom, even if I'm 51, I'm about to be 51, I travel the world, I live all around the world, is what is going to happen tomorrow when she's not around anymore. You know, literally, she's thinking in this way like many mothers and fathers. So, if I tell her, look mom, you can still be around, she will love it. Now, obviously, we need to make sure that we preserve the emotions and the knowledge of the right people in the right way. You know, it's not easy, but again, it's not about yes or not. It's going to happen anyway, it's that we need to talk about what is the moral compass, what are the boundaries we need to put to technology to make sure we go in the right direction.
So to answer your question, I know they're long, long answers, you know, these four categories, they connect very well with technology and our products. Those are really the framework we're going to use to project the future of how people interact with our technologies, our brands.
And to move on to talking about the products themselves, not specific products, but designing products and the kind of design language. You've talked before about, you know, the 80s, that period of optimism that was also a period of very expressive design which is quite different from a lot of design today, especially in the technology sphere. But when we were speaking before you were extolling the virtues of a more expressive design language and that's something you want to bring to Samsung. Tell us about that.
Well, when I joined the company, management told me one of your tasks, one of your priorities is the one of designing this one Samsungness. You know, what is the identity of Samsung? What do we stand for? What is one Samsungness? And there were multiple points of view of what that could be. It's not an easy thing to do because you are a company, you design earbuds, all kind of wearable devices and refrigerators and washing machines. So one product identity is already an impossible challenge, or is a challenge that maybe we don't want to take. It doesn't make too much sense to have one identity across these categories of products. But there is something much more profound than just the nature of our portfolio.
And I'll give you an example of something very concrete. I was thinking about that identity and I was thinking about some of the products, amazing products that the company designed in the past years. For instance, this beautiful Serif TV designed by Bouroullec or the Frame TV designed with Yves Béhar or a series of other products that were designed by our internal team, and sooner or later I will introduce the internal team, that are really unique. So I was thinking if I create an identity even inside one category, let's say the identity of all our televisions, it means that I need to kill the diversity of these products. Products that are really exciting, they give you an emotion, they're beautiful, they're products that you remember.
You know, in 2008 I bought the Bordeaux TV of Samsung. It's a TV that really changed the perception of Samsung in the world of tech. I remember I was, you know, I'm a designer's designer. I was monitoring the brand, the company. I remember the shift from looking at them as this Korean, actually probably we were just thinking Asian, not even Korean back then, Asian company to a leader. And I bought the TV and then I bought these speakers that had this beautiful organic shape. And the speakers were so beautiful that I kept them. You know, I was not working for Samsung. I had no idea that in the future I was going to work for Samsung. I still have them today, almost 20 years later.
You know, over time, I built, you know, the first brands that were building these wireless speakers for the house. I bought, I'm not going to name the brand, but I bought one of these brands. So I have all this system with all these speakers and yet I bought an amplifier from this brand to attach the Samsung speakers that, by the way, by now are obsolete in terms of technology 20 years later. And yet they are so beautiful that I want them there. Even though the sound again was not, I had the other speakers that give me the sound that I want, but they weren't there.
The other day I was on television, for the Italians in the room, I was interviewed by Fabio Volo and this show, Kong, because Lorenzo was a guest and he stole five minutes at the beginning. Thank you because you said beautiful words. I'm very grateful. We didn't arrive to a question. Thank God. Thank you, Lorenzo. It was super difficult for me to answer. I had no idea what to answer. Fabio was going to ask me this. He told me, look, I love mercatini, vintage markets. So I go there and I buy products from 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So the question was, in 20 or 30 years, what products of today will we buy in those mercatini, in those vintage stores?
It's really difficult to answer because especially if you think of tech, everything converges towards this very minimalistic, essential kind of language, stripped away from any variation and diversity in a world where everything...
looks alike refrigerators, mobile phones, televisions, you know, they're very similar to one another. There is not that diversity, that excitement that I used to have. For instance, I remember in the 80s, in the 90s, I would go to the store and I would get excited, you know, by a TV before even turning on the TV, by the object television. They were all different and beautiful. The speakers, remember the cassette players and then the CD players and then the MP3 players. I was traveling the world. I would go to Taiwan and Japan and Korea, then to the United States, and every region had different kinds of shapes, different kinds of designs. The same for mobile phones. Samsung was designing so many different incredibly exciting mobile phones. There were so many different shapes. It was a feast for the five senses. You would go to these stores and it was so exciting to see all these things, and every year, every month there would be new stuff. So you would go back to the store. There are people here, retailers here, you know, people were excited to go to the store. Today you don't need to go to the store. You go online, you buy everything online.
Unless we reinject those emotions into the products. Unless we reinject diversity into these products. Now tech is an anomaly. If you think of fashion, if you think of furniture, lighting, automotive, architecture, there is so much diversity. You have minimalism and maximalism. Not just between brands. Eventually in the same brand, you know, you work in Prada. Prada. Today I'm dressed... no, I'm not Prada, I'm sorry. So yesterday was Prada, all black, super minimal. Prada gives you extreme minimalism and then it gives you the opposite, you know, things that are so bold and iconic that it's not easy to wear, under the same brand. The identity is not defined by a specific style but a philosophy, an approach, a kind of innovation that you have in the brand. But again, this is true. I mean, we are in the furniture fair. There are so many furniture brands that have so many different manifestations of that brand. There are so many, you know, we have many renowned designers here in the room today. And there is the artistic interpretation of so many different people and creative leaders. But then there is the vision of the brand. There is the philosophy of the brand. They unite everything in one story. And then there are many other things that you can, you know, use to build that kind of identity. But the point is...
My living room is different than yours, is different than yours, is different than yours. Why do our TVs need to look all the same? Why don't we have products that reflect the diversity of humanity? Why don't we bring back something that was already happening in tech and we lost around 2007, 8, 9, 10? You know, progressively tech went in the direction of this very minimalistic kind of language. So my idea is to bring back emotion, diversity. There is space for minimalism. You in this show, you see pieces that are very minimalistic, but then there is space also for iconic, bold, colorful, emotional products. A different kind of emotion. They're both emotional. And again, we are in Italy. I'm Italian.
In, you know, in the 70s, minimalism, form... I mean, a wrong interpretation of form follows function, because function could be an emotional function or a utilitarian function, but over time it's been interpreted in a different way, and form follows function led to minimalism and essential design. So in those years there was a lot of this, without naming any brand, but there was a lot of this, and that's when... and it was really, wow, inspiring. And that's when in the 80s here in Italy, a guy called Sottsass with a bunch of friends decided to create Memphis as a reaction to this, like, and we want colors, we want shapes, we want poetry in these products. Memphis influenced... anyway, they influenced each other, Olivetti and the world of tech, and he started a movement, you know, that went beyond Italy. Of course, then again, late 2000s, we went back to minimalism. My hope is not to go back to Memphis, but actually to blend the Bauhaus approach and the Memphis approach. So what they represent, not exactly what they were doing, in something that is more global, that is global and local.
I will close with K-pop. You know, I moved to Korea one year ago and it was so fascinating for me because I lived many, many years in Europe, then many years in the United States. 15 years, I became an American citizen, and the idea that I could go now to Asia and learn from Asia was incredible. And then especially in Korea, that is the coolest country in Asia right now, I was like, wow. Then as an Italian, Korea more or less is the same size as Italy, more or less the same amount of people, but they are far away in the Far East, you know, and the language is very difficult to learn, and so, you know, they have many constraints similar to the ones of Italy, but even bigger than the ones of Italy. And yet they were able to build K-pop and everything they did in movies and then beauty and all the things that many people don't know, like the incredible retail experience you have in Seoul and in Korea, or the culture of coffee. I mean, Italian coffee, where coffee... the coffee in Korea, the rituality of coffee is incredible. And there is one common denominator across all these things that they did in the matter of a few decades.
They took global trends. Instead of rejecting them like other cultures do, they embrace them, but then they interpret them in a totally original way, twisting, you know, those global trends in a way that is uniquely Korean. Take K-pop, you know, the music, the sound is very American pop, but then you find sentences in Korean or entire songs sometimes in Korean. The outfit of the K-pop stars, they're totally familiar for us globally. We love them, but they're totally Korean in the execution. The choreography, the way they dance, again, familiar to everybody, but yet very uniquely Korean. All the motion graphics, the graphic, the visual communication behind their concerts is this melting pot of different kinds of cultures. Again, familiar but unique. I would go to these coffee shops and I would feel home, but then I start... so emotionally I would feel home. There are so many coffee shops. So many, I mean, incredible, but then you start to use your brain. You start to think, you start to reflect, and you realize there is nothing like this in Italy. There's nothing like this in the US. So they blended something that feels familiar with a unique approach to that kind of culture. So this is pretty amazing. And so in this kind of world, how can we build that kind of diversity? How can we have the Korean interpretation, the Italian interpretation, the Austrian interpretation, the Egyptian interpretation, the... Now I'm going to... I need to name at least one country per continent: the Brazilian interpretation, the United States interpretation, and the Nigerian interpretation. Did I miss any country? Australian.
[laughter] Anyone else want to raise their hands?
Canadian. Canadian. Well, I said United States. I'm sorry, Karim, you're right.
I said Egyptian looking at you and then you caught me on the Canadian. [laughter] And yeah, how do you bring that diversity to a portfolio like Samsung's as the chief design officer?
