The Seoul of Design

Summoning the Gaiatsu

Bruce and Miho threw out the Art Center's curriculum and invented something new. Some of the resulting initiatives were highly tactical--quick hits aimed at forging a collaborative work environment. Designers were required to take a yearlong course in mechanical engineering to better prepare them to defend their ideas. "Before they could design a product, they had to know how to make it work," Bruce says. Up-and-coming engineers and managers from other disciplines were also brought into IDS so they could learn to work with designers--and designers could learn to work with them. Such partnerships are the principle behind Samsung's Creating New Business Group, an elite team of designers, technologists, and experts in marketing and manufacturing, who study consumers and create what-if scenarios, all in an effort to glean the world's future buying habits.

IDS also took on the larger challenge of breaking the Korean practice of education through memorization. Now the students would learn by doing. To gain a better understanding of their own cultural heritage, for example, they produced a DVD on Sokkuram, a mountain shrine that houses a peerless eighth-century statue of Buddha.

Often, progress came slowly. In one class assignment, Bruce asked his students to present what they considered to be a perfectly designed object. His own choice: a banana. "Nature is the best designer," he told them. "The banana fits in your pocket. It comes in its own sanitary package. It's biodegradable. And the color indicates when the fruit is ripe." For a moment, a befuddled silence cloaked the class. Then came a question: "You mean," asked one student, "you want us to design a cell phone in the shape of a banana?"

Miho decided that Samsung's designers most needed a gaiatsu, the Japanese term for an outside force that delivers great change. He wanted IDS's students to experience profoundly original ideas at the source. And so Samsung's gaiatsu became the world at large. Miho and Bruce launched the Global Design Workshop, a traveling tutorial in which a couple dozen students visited the world's great design centers: Athens, Delhi, Florence, London, New York, and beyond. "In Paris, we discussed the designs of the Imperial Class of Louis XIV," Miho recalls. "In Berlin, we saw how Germany was once divided, just like Korea is now--and yet the Germans still produced incredibly original designs, like the Mercedes-Benz. We visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and saw the earliest model of the Apple computer. They were surprised by how primitive it looked, but they finally understood that it's the idea that matters."

Samsung has continued, through its Design Power Program, to send its most promising designers to study at the world's top universities and institutions. And the company has beefed up its global presence by launching design studios in London, Los Angeles, Milan, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo.

Defining an Identity

Samsung's instinct was to develop a design language that grew out of Korean culture.

Samsung's in-house school gave its designers the tools and confidence to risk thinking differently. But there remained an equally vexing challenge: The company lacked a universal design ethos--a measurable, clearly defined set of principles that its designers could replicate and its customers could intuitively understand. Samsung's instinct was to develop a design language that grew out of Korean culture. But that proved equally hard to define. China's Han, Ming, and Tung dynasties, as well as the Mongols, Russians, Japanese, and even American missionaries had all left elements of their cultures on the peninsula. Unearthing a true Korean character proved difficult, but Samsung discovered it in the Tae Kuk--the yin-yang symbol found on the South Korean flag that represents the simultaneous unity and duality of all things. From the Tae Kuk, Samsung developed its touchstone: "Balance of Reason and Feeling."

"Reason and feeling are opposites, but they are essential to each other," says Sangyeon Lee, who heads Samsung's San Francisco design studio. "In design terms, 'reason' is rational, sharp-edged, and very geometric. 'Feeling' is soft and organic--it makes an emotional connection with the user. Taken together, reason and feeling give us a way to frame our design identity, which is always evolving."

A task force spent a year developing and perfecting a scale, with reason at one end and feeling on the other, which is now used to ensure that every single product design hews to Samsung's brand positioning. That generally falls near the scale's center--thereby striking a balance. Samsung did the same with two other key words: "simplicity" and "complexity."