PHOTO USED WITH THE PERMISSION OF SALLY ANDERSEN-BRUCE.
Gordon Bruce leads an industrial design exercise with his students at the
Innovative Design Laboratory of Samsung, or IDS, in the mid-1990s.Chairman Lee liked the idea. He approved the curriculum of the Global
Design Workshop, a plan to take Samsung’s design students for nine weeks
each year to Europe, the Americas, or other Asian countries, where Bruce
and Miho would teach them about different cultures, peoples, and their
tools.
“A mobile phone, after all, is not just a device but an artifact, reflective
of the society that made it,” Bruce told his students.
For weeks at a time, he and Miho brought the Samsung designers to see
Apple’s first computers at the Smithsonian, the graceful temples of the old
capital of Kyoto in Japan, the palaces of France’s Bourbon dynasty, and the
cars of Germany’s world-class autobahn.
“Mercedes-Benz prospered with its design,” Bruce recalled telling them.
“But Mercedes had been through hard times. They’d been through the
destruction of World War II and the division of East and West Germany.”
The message? If Germany could progress this far, then Korean
employees—another people divided into two countries that had
experienced the devastation of war—could do it at Samsung.