The Seoul of Design

Here, Samsung generally hews closer to simplicity--it wants its designs to be intuitive and humanistic. Samsung even maps its competitors on the two scales:

In one recent analysis, Apple occupied the "simplicity/feeling" zone, with Sony in the "complexity/reason" field. Samsung seeks out the areas where there are no competitors--that's where opportunity lies.

Samsung undertook a particularly difficult balancing act with its design for the YP-T8 portable media player, which hit the North American market this fall. The company's product planners landed heavily on the "reason/complexity" end of the spectrum by stuffing the palm-sized gadget with features: FM radio, voice recorder, photo viewer, text viewer, game functions, and video and audio playback. The device was packed with so many functions that its initial, rough design was "machinelike and rectangular--not so user friendly," recalls Miri Lee, the T8's Seoul-based designer.

To strike the right balance on the T8's design continuum, Miri Lee had to pull the device back to the center, toward "feeling/simplicity." Lee began by drawing a series of squares, each containing a different product spec. She layered the squares on top of one another, hoping to find a form that could elegantly contain the device's functions. "Each square was like a black hole that took in all my thoughts," she says. "The more squares I drew, the more design problems I had to resolve."

Lee strove to give the device a soft, feminine feel, with a curved shape so users could grip and operate it easily with one hand. Her design team struggled to pare away as many control keys as possible. Eventually, they came up with three clickable buttons that are centered beneath an outsized, horizontal LCD screen. They spent additional weeks tweaking every detail, from the fit and finish of the T8's silicone case to the color and size of the fonts on the display screen, all in an effort to give the device a minimalist look and feel. Lee refined the T8's cell-phone-like shape by dipping into Samsung's Idea Bank--a global database of design concepts that initially failed to find their way to market but are valuable enough to be recycled into new products at a later date. There, she found the basic design language for the T8's rounded shape and large screen, then translated it to better fit the tiny media player.

How did Lee know she had struck the right balance between form and function? She says she simply felt it in her gut. And that's a sure sign, as Sangyeon Lee suggests, that designers have found a Tae Kuk unity and duality of their own: They are simultaneously thinking for themselves and thinking the Samsung way.

Bill Breen (bbreen@fastcompany.com) is Fast Company's senior projects editor.