‘Human-centered design is a must for Samsung devices’
SAN FRANCISCO — Samsung Electronics has been increasingly putting its emphasis on product design and its ultimate goal is to deliver meaningful experiences through beautiful yet functional products, the firm’s design lab leader said Friday.
“Our mission is to understand people and how people live so we can design new experiences to introduce into people’s lives. We can do that through designing new products and new interfaces,” said Federico Casalegno, head of Samsung Design Innovation Center.
Samsung has been operating a design lab in the U.S. since 1994. After the lab was moved to San Francisco in 2012, the firm reorganized the design lab and renamed it to the SDIC in 2018.
Casalegno holds a Ph.D. degree in sociology of culture and communication from the Sorbonne University in Paris. While working as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he founded the MIT Design Lab and the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. He joined Samsung in 2018.
As the SDIC is dedicated to the integration of disruptive user-experiences to product design, Casalegno emphasized the importance of designing products based on user experience. To make more consumers buy more Samsung products, he added the design lab should consider every step of the purchasing process when designing a prod- uct.
“This design lab is very unique because we are in the heart of Silicon Valley. We can work with startups in innovative ways. Our design center can produce global mega-hit products through local insights that Silicon Valley has,” Casalegno said.
“User experience is about how it works and how it looks like. Experience comes from the full journey across all touch-points. From awareness of the product to purchase it, every element of the journey must be holistically designed and be human-centered to provide great experiences.”
Stating the SDIC also has contributed to create stronger insights based on a deep understanding of consumer lifestyle trends, another mission of the design lab is studying about millennial consumers who were born between 1982 and 2000.
“The millennial consumers have become a major consumer segment, we are trying to understand millennials’ lifestyles and expectations,” Casalegno said.