good.
“In Asia,” he told the group, “form is everything.”
“We agreed to set up an educational institute at Samsung, but only as
short-term consultants,” Bruce said. It would be called the Innovative
Design Lab of Samsung, or IDS. It was set to open in 1995. “But first, we
needed to do some fact-finding, to diagnose the problems at Samsung.
[Only] then could we help the Korean designers find inspiration.”
Their mandate would prove much harder than they thought.—
AN ENTOURAGE OF LIMOUSINES picked up Gordon Bruce, James Miho,
and David Brown at Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport to begin a fact-
finding tour, and later drove them to a helicopter pad, where they’d embark
on a tour of the country. Miky Lee, Peter Arnell, and a group of executives
joined them.
“Is that ours?” Bruce asked.
A flying fortress of a helicopter befitting presidents and dignitaries
emerged above them from the clouds.
Samsung’s VIP helicopter landed, and the group boarded.
“I pulled out my video camera and started recording,” Bruce said.
Bruce could see that South Korea was a nation in the throes of change,
at the dawn of a national awakening. The chopper flew over rolling
mountains and the autumn riverine palette, where shamanistic burial
mounds and quiet farming villages were interrupted by factories and
military bases.
After they landed, they traveled across the country by car and on foot.
Bruce, Miho, and Brown walked around marketplaces and bucolic villages
for aesthetic inspiration. They wandered into a Buddhist temple with a
stone turtle at the front and an obelisk on top, and took notes on its
meaning: the turtle as a symbol of longevity, the pattern and shape of its
shell used in ancient fortune-telling. Bruce walked around markets and saw
traditional garments sitting there unsold that had modern applications.
“My favorite was the bojagi cloth,” Bruce later recalled, “a patchwork
quilt with pockets sewn together. It had all the design principles of
economy, quality, user-friendliness, and ecology.”
His enthusiasm was met with disinterest from his Samsung guides.