Federico Casalegno: Samsung EVP and MIT Design Lab founder on what 20,000 years of human creativity means for design today

0:01Federico Casalegno:We are all trained to see the world with a certain lens. So it's really a challenge to be in the same room and trying to be in someone else's shoes, empathize with our colleagues and see they can have different approaches or they see problems in a different way that we see, but eventually absolutely very useful. So really crossing the boundaries of discipline is a fundamental element to run creative work. When Samsung's CEO asked Federico Casaleño to redesign the cameras on the company's phones, Federico told him he was the wrong person for the job. He wasn't an optical engineer. He didn't understand cameras.

0:40What he understood was storytelling. And he pointed to the Lascaux Caves in France, where people were marking walls 20 ,000 years ago for the same reason we hold up our phones today. To capture a moment and tell it to someone we love. That's the kind of answer you get from a designer who arrived by way of studying human society. Federico is head of Samsung's Global Design Studios, with teams spread across San Francisco, Europe, and Seoul. Before that, he spent two decades at MIT, where he co-founded the MIT Design Lab with Bill Mitchell, and before that, he was a social scientist embedded with engineers and psychologists at Philips Design in the 90s, back when cross-disciplinary wasn't yet a word anyone put on a job posting.

1:22We talk about what that looks like in practice at the scale that Samsung operates at. His team builds digital twins of human ears, which is kind of amazing. They use thousands of 3D and 4D scans across real demographics, then simulate millions of variations to figure out how an earbud should fit. Then they strap the buds onto robots and make them run. Then they test with actual humans because at some point, a person still has to decide what comfortable means. There's a phrase that Federico kept returning to. Technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose. The designer's role is the problem-making first, you've got to understand the problem, then comes the problem-solving later.

2:06We also get into how critique works inside a company that speaks a dozen native languages, what he actually looks for when hiring, and the French philosopher who at 102 looked at his calendar and said he was booked until next year. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Willard. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech.

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3:28We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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4:41And now, back to the show.

4:48Federico Castellegno, welcome to Design Better. Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me. We're quite excited to have you here. You have a very interesting background. So you have a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne, and you happen to be in Paris right now. You spent two decades at MIT, and now you're running design at a large consumer electronics company, Samsung. What was the moment that you realized that being a social scientist was actually the thing that made you a better designer?

5:14Federico Casalegno:Since the moment I started doing my PhD in sociology and communication science, I've been always interested in how human communication was mediated through medium technology. So back then, mid-90s, I was doing a lot of work on what we call Balleting Board System, BBS, basically pre-internet. And my interest was not on, of course, on the technology, but really trying to understand how the overlaying of social communication online and physical aspect of human interaction were merging. And then for sustaining my studies, I started to work with field design in design. So at that time, I immediately and organically merged social science and studying human communication and the angle of design through a big corporation.

6:06Federico Casalegno:So it was basically from the beginning of my career, I would say. So you have this phrase that really struck us, technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose. Curious where that comes from. And was there some moment in your design process or maybe even the work you were doing at MIT where that developed? Technology without humanity's perfection without purpose basically embrace at least two things. The first one is that I'm deeply, deeply concerned by humans, by people. So my work is really trying to understand how we can design in order to improve the quality of the lives of people across a variety of areas.

6:45Federico Casalegno:So first of all, how do we bring humanity in what we do? and two, while I'm deeply fascinated by the potential and possibility of the development of technologies, we're not in the R &D business, let's say. So R &D is really trying to push the boundaries and the limits of technology and innovation and that's perfectly fine. We love that. But our role is really to bend the technological development into what technology should do in order to improve people's life rather than what technology can do. So the role of design is really to bring together this different aspect of human aspirations, social concerns, people's dreams and aspirations, and see how we can craft the development of technologies and embody this technology into private that really support people in their everyday life, I would say.

7:39That's basically how I really trying to bring this deeply humanity center, if you want to include also the sensibility to not arming the planet or really trying to have like a sustainable development of electronics and

7:54Federico Casalegno:products for our planet as well. This seems like a very timely principle to guide us. I'm curious how you think about this specifically in terms of AI, because it's augmenting so much of human input, and we still want to preserve what makes us wonderful as human beings. I mean, we do really a lot of work using AI from a variety of angles. So we just presented some of the work that we are doing on computation design, applying AI to develop products. So from, let's say, hardcore product development through strategy and ethnographic work, trying to understand people, AI starts really to be the layer by which we really start to build our practice, develop our tools, methods, and basically become the lens through which we understand the reality and design the reality.

8:47Federico Casalegno:In computational design, for example, we see AI is very, very powerful for things. One is automation. You can automate tasks very pragmatically and rapidly so designer can focus more on the more strategic side of it or creative side of it. So So one is design automation with AI. Two is design and computation. So you can really compute and analyze a variety of inputs from data at the speed of light and have a very clear perspective on things. If you do this for product, wearable development, or strategy, you can really have access to this data. And then, of course, production. I don't call it this creativity because I would say creativity belongs to humans, but you can produce a variety of variations of images, products, text, and so on.

9:35Federico Casalegno:So you can quickly produce a lot of content and then humans or teams can take advantage of this. And finally, is optimization. So you can utilize AI to optimize four factors, products, material developments, and so on. So automation, optimization, production, and computation are areas where AI can really They help teams and designers in particular. But at the end of the day, we have a formula, which is AI equal EI plus HI. Artificial intelligence equal emotional intelligence plus human imaginations. So in that sense, we're really trying to bring to the table the human centricity, the human in the loop, how you can drive those tools to the purpose that you wish to accomplish.

10:25Federico Casalegno:As a designer, how do you set the KPIs? How do you set the objective of what you need and really trying to use the tools rather than being utilized by the tools and in a very different way? I want to back up for a minute because I think some of your earlier academic work may have prepared you in some ways for a current era where these roles are very much blurring between the boundaries of design and engineering and business. So you are the co-founder of the Design Lab and one of its goals was to be a collection of these multidisciplinary research and product teams. It sounds like it has a lot of overlap with the D school where I teach, which has similar goals in doing those types of things.

11:01And we're just seeing more and more, even in our students, where before they may have had some challenges in executing, say, on the engineering side of something. Now they can lean on these tools and get a lot further, at least with an advanced prototype. Maybe talk a little bit about kind of your early work there and how that might have prepared you for what you're doing now.

11:19Federico Casalegno:So I had the honor, the privilege to work with Bill Mitchell, which was the dean of the School of Architecture at that time at MIT and then become the head of Media Lab. And together we started in 2006, the design lab, which basically was, by definition, a collection of set of skills of people coming from very different backgrounds. I had the honor to teach for more than 10 years at the Media Lab, which the media has been funded by bringing together engineering, art, creativity, and design from a variety of perspectives. So I really think that one of the driving principle for us was how do you break the boundaries of disciplines by really trying to bring together and understand the complex situation in which we live?

12:03Federico Casalegno:Because if you really think at the human and social level, you really need to see things from a variety of perspective. You need to consider a variety of elements. So the only way that you can do it is really trying to have different lenses and bring people with different sets of skills together. So the secret for us were really how do you break the boundaries on one end. A second driving principle for the MIT design lab was making. The MIT motto is mens and manus. And the idea was not only learning by doing, but also prototype early, prototype quickly, deploy, learn, and basically work with people rather than just create in an ivory tower and then inject your creation into society.

12:50Federico Casalegno:So these two things really helped to shape the vision of the importance of bringing people with different skills in the same domain. And it was very challenging, of course, because we are all trained to see the world with a certain lens. So it's really challenging to be in the same room and trying to be in someone else's shoes. empathize with our colleagues and see they can have like a different approaches or they see problems in a different way that we see, but eventually absolutely very useful. So really crossing the boundaries of discipline is a fundamental element to run creative work. So these philosophies and methodologies that are championed at MIT and are familiar at Stanford d school, a lot of these things kind of trickle into the industry in various ways, but sometimes they're not always well received.

13:44I'm curious how those philosophies you just described, how they were received or are being received in the design teams globally at Samsung.

13:55Federico Casalegno:I would say two things. The first one is the first time I've been exposed actually to this type of philosopher was even before joining MIT. You know, I had the privilege to work in Phillips Design. At that time, I was a social scientist working with psychologists, with engineers, with designers. So our team, they really have a variety of skills and really was, for me, eye-opening. And I'm thinking like we're in the 90s. Now, the notion of working across skill is definitely well expanded and definitely accepted in certain extent. But it is true that there are disciplines or areas that usually tend to run faster and dominate.

14:38Federico Casalegno:In my case, I would say three things. The first one, I create teams that have a variety of different skills, and they work together from day one, not linearly, but organically. So that's the first point. The second point, what I do usually is we take people with certain type of skills, maybe they have applied those skills to different domains, and we transfer those skills into totally new domains. So in that case, they still have their own capabilities, no other set of tools, but they need to apply those tools in product or experience that they never thought about before. And the third thing is sometimes I see naturally happening because when we have discussions all together, I see slowly people trying to expand and bring their own skills into different dimensions that they haven't thought before.

15:32Federico Casalegno:So we have a group of designers that really start to work with creative technologists and start to work with behavioral scientists and so on. Little by little, they open their horizons and see absolutely the value of tackling one problem with different type of lenses and from different perspectives. And sort of the same way that you're talking about working in a cross-disciplinary way, I'm a little curious, too, about sort of working cross-culturally. So you're at Samsung, which is a large company with a long history. I was reading a little bit up on it because I didn't know much about the history.

16:04And they started back in the 1930s, I think, selling dried fish. So it's changed a lot over the years. And it's become a huge technology company with its own culture, I'm sure, and history. your own history spans Italy and MIT and teams all over the place here in Paris right now. So how do you approach kind of working across these cultures and working across maybe language barriers and things like that in an effective way?

16:29Federico Casalegno:I love being exposed to very different culture. As I said, I'm Italian. I've been studying and lived for many years in Paris. I moved to MIT in year 2000 in Boston, and now I live in San Francisco and they work with the Korean company, have colleagues from all over the world. So I think multiculturalism is now a wonderful asset. I still remember one of the discussions we had at the very beginning of my work at MIT about designing a car or designing a house. We designed a completely smart home where in the year 2006, 2007, when you start to think how you design the kitchen, applying AI, and you have someone from India, from Italy, from United States that discuss the value of food.

17:19Federico Casalegno:And everyone bring their own cultural lens into the world. It's extremely enriching. So from the cultural lens, I think is amazing. As a company level, I would say that the Korean culture is absolutely very open right now. As you said, Samsung changed business in the past decades from a food company to an amazing consumer electronic company. So we change business as a company that learns. But if you see the scene of what's happening in Korea right now, it's fascinating. Like in the past 20 years, we went from a country nation that now has a Nobel Prize in literature, win an Oscar in Hollywood, define music with K-pop, art, food, and science.

18:05Federico Casalegno:So culturally it's a melting pot of everything. And I feel that this is happening also inside our company. We receive, we understand, and we are curious. There is very much an open view of absorbing culture. And then of course I feel that there is a large corporation. So we still have our boundaries. We still have our own practice is a large corporation, but that's not different from many other big corporations. It's fascinating what you said about how Korean culture is very open right now. It very much does seem like it's open for business because it's everywhere, very global in a way that hasn't been.

18:43So that was an interesting take on how you connect and a very Italian answer I might point out that connecting through food, that's a very Italian approach, which I wholeheartedly endorse. But there's another part of the challenge of having teams all over the world, which is just straight up awareness of who's working on what, making sure there's no overlap or redundancy, and creating opportunities for people to learn from one another. How do you approach that?

19:10Federico Casalegno:First of all, we use different set of tools that everybody uses where we share documents and we share what we do. So we're trying to make sure that everyone is up to date of what's going on in different teams. Secondly, basically when I travel, when I'm in San Francisco, my meeting starts in the morning with Europe and then I go in the office in San Francisco. At 4, 5 p.m. in San Francisco, I start to work with Korea. So I still feel the need of connected and having like distance video calls, but also to connect in person. So we organize a variety of workshops or opportunity for the teams to get together.

19:49Federico Casalegno:It is true we have redundant work. Sometimes it's not ideal, but sometimes having same teams that work in very similar direction can give us, first of all, either a confirmation of if one team is working in one area and the other in the same area, we can confirm or not if we have the right directions, or we can challenge and afterwards we can actually redefine the direction, the things that we need to do and the direction we need to go. So can we also see as a positive element. Other than that, we have a 24-7 basically clock because from Europe, United States and South Korea, we really work 24-7 and my team, they work independently.

20:29Federico Casalegno:So probably the most important thing is to make sure that the teams know the mission, the objective, the purpose of what they're doing. And then our job is to hire really smart people and they will figure this out. But given the clear mission, this really can avoid overlap or wasting time for everyone. What are some of the ways that you think about articulating that mission? Are there artifacts or ways that you kind of spread that through your team? From MIT, I really brought this idea of quick prototypes that somehow embody an idea or a vision. So independently that you, a prototype can be a video, a prototype can be a paper prototype.

21:12Federico Casalegno:And today with AI and the latest tools, you can make working prototypes that really are amazing if you are. So having an artifact, a product, a mockup, an interface that you can discuss and having a team to discuss, I think is definitely a good center point, focus point for the team to look at something and start to critically and constructively discuss how you can align on the mission and what we need to do. So it's basically, it's building things where we're thinking and constantly aligning and readjusting. But at the end of the day, we always have our final goal. We know what we need to deliver.

21:50Federico Casalegno:And that's also very important for the team and the teamwork that we do. We actually have a question from the Design Better community for you. So Paula Ring, who's a Design Better subscriber, She works at Siemens and she's working in large organizations, so probably has a lot to learn from your approach. She asks, we always talk about being iterative and building in data feedback loops after we launch something. But oftentimes the truth ends up being that once we launch, we're already off to the next urgent fire, something else we have to do. There's very little time to go back and measure and iterate.

22:27It seems like a lot of what Federico's team might be doing is rooted in multitudes of feedback loops and iterations. And I think in a few places you've talked about digital twins. How do you approach that iterative learning, data gathering, and so forth?

22:46Federico Casalegno:So that's a very good and important question, especially if you need to design product that do not exist right now. You don't have a lot of heritage and knowledge that you can learn from the past. So one thing that I started and literally come from MIT is... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. Once you do, you'll get access to every full-length episode, all ad-free, monthly AMAs with inspiring people in design and tech, and recordings of all our past AMAs. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program.

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23:46Design Better is supported by Masterclass. So many designers we talk to tell us that they're stressed out about how rapidly the creative process is changing. I know it's cliche to say AI is changing the world, but hey, it's true. I've been building with AI for a while now, and I still don't have my head fully wrapped around how everything works. That's why I took Fei-Fei Li's masterclass. Her point is that AI has no direction of its own. The forces shaping it are human choices, and people who understand those forces don't just keep up with the technology. They steer it. And that changed my perspective.