Design Revolution
“THE UPCOMING TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY marks the Age of Culture,” the
chairman of Samsung proclaimed in his New Year’s address in 1996, “an
era in which intellectual assets will determine a company’s worth.
“No longer is a company selling products. Instead they have to sell their
philosophy and culture.” He went on to declare 1996 the Year of the Design
Revolution. Gordon Bruce had launched his first design class at Samsung
four months earlier.
In the mid-1990s, the forces of “digital convergence” were leveling the
giants of Silicon Valley, turning computers into televisions and phones into
music players and music players into obsolete junk. Tech giants like Sony
and IBM, which had grown up through hardware sales, were pushed back to
the starting line along with Samsung. Every device was now being
connected through design, software, content, and user experience.
At the chairman’s proclamation, Samsung went into a frenzy. The team
tasked with disseminating the chairman’s messages, the Samsung
Economics Research Institute (SERI), published a handbook of the
chairman’s tenets, called the “design scrapbook.” The clear message?
Samsung was to forge an identity of minimalism and sleekness. Among the
benchmark products he identified were the Sony Walkman, the Coke
bottle, the Braun coffeemaker, the Sydney National Opera House, the
Minneapolis Zoo sign system (one of Time magazine’s best designs of
1981), and the PowerBook, Apple’s early laptop.
Samsung was eager to study Apple and its intuitive simplicity. The
PowerBook, the chairman’s design scrapbook noted, had to sacrifice
features for portability in an era of boxy, large computer components, back
when people bought PCs for their hardware features rather than their