designers to work at its young office in Palo Alto, California, which opened
in 1994, and set up design centers in London in 2000, Shanghai in 2004,
Milan in 2005, and New Delhi in 2008.
The Samsung designers in Northern California, in an office called
Samsung Design America, began embracing a practice called perceptual
mapping to identify their taegeuk of design. A new logo, used across the
company, had one axis consisting of the opposites “simplicity” and
“complexity” and another axis featuring the words “feeling” and “reason.”
The designers put Apple in the quadrant of “simplicity/feeling” and
Sony, the hardware maker, in the quadrant marked “complexity/reason.”
Samsung’s electronics were complex and rational, filled with square
angles, placing Samsung closer to Sony’s domain.
But being in this quadrant was undesirable, as it placed Samsung in
narrow competition with Sony without differentiating its product. So the
designers targeted their assault in the middle ground between Sony and
Apple—which they felt gave the company its best market opening,
overshooting slightly more toward Apple’s soft and curvy designs.
The effort was a needed kick start to Chairman Lee’s vision. One
student developed Samsung’s first “smart home” concept, uniting every
Samsung appliance, washer, phone, and computer in a conceptual
ecosystem. He won a design award from the chairman himself.
Lee Min-hyouk, who later designed the early Galaxy smartphones, used
his new knowledge to convince Samsung to manufacture the first flip-cover
phone, without an external antenna. It was called the “Benz phone” after a
Norwegian newspaper likened its look and feel to a Mercedes-Benz car. At
ten million units sold, it was a bestseller of its time.
In the late 1990s, Ted Shin, having graduated from Gordon Bruce’s
course, was working as a mobile phone designer in an elite in-house group,
tasked with thinking up futuristic, far-off concepts.
“I called it the I-Phone,” he said. “Information phone.”
“The cellphone was becoming a hub of everything, a computer,” he
said. “My proposal was a color screen in which you can connect to the web,
you can send messages, you can write with a pen, you can connect to
whoever you want to.”
Novel for its time, the I-Phone had a keyboard and made use of
software and hardware advances that resulted in larger and sharper displays,
allowing users to more easily surf the Web and text one another.