Millions of photos, Branzi and… two watches: Mauro Porcini is redesigning Samsung beyond minimalism

Milan, top floor of the Samsung tower. Through the glass walls, you can look out over a city that keeps transforming itself: new residential towers, sequences of cranes, a skyline in constant refresh. Mauro Porcini, President and Chief Design Officer of Samsung Electronics, towers over the room in his own way. He is dressed in dark clothes, elegant but far from any corporate cliché. Glasses hanging from a chain over his crew-neck sweater, Gucci boots with the distinctive rainbow of the Michele-Bizzarri era, a Samsung Ring on his finger. He shakes my hand and introduces himself by his first name.

He is wearing two watches, one on each wrist: on the left, a latest-generation Samsung smartwatch; on the right, a traditional mechanical watch. It is not a detail. It is a trigger.

For some, it might seem like an elementary opposition: analogue versus digital. For Porcini, the issue runs deeper. “This is identity. The other is function,” he says, pointing to the watches. One is an object meant to last, perhaps to be handed down: a piece of jewellery; the other is a device that monitors, updates, interacts with an ecosystem in constant evolution, and for which it makes sense to own a recent model.

Mauro Porcini

In that coexistence, one catches a glimpse of his mission: to pull technological design out of a certain uniformity into which, according to Porcini, it has slipped. “Today we find ourselves with a very homogeneous language, products all look the same. From the television to the refrigerator, from the phone to the oven: the code is the same.” But his is not a crusade against minimalism. “If you want a minimalist object, it is right that you should be able to buy it,” he says. The problem arises when minimalism becomes the only possible grammar. “Mine is a reaction to the lack of choice.”

For decades, industrial design has made the modernist formula of form follows function its own. Porcini does not reject it, but rereads it. “Form and function follow meaning.” It is not an invitation to ornament. It is a different hierarchy: first you define the meaning an object should have in people’s lives, then you determine how it should look and how it should work. “Form and function can adapt depending on the meaning I need to create for you.”

Fashion and architecture serve him as a counterpoint. In those fields, change is itself a grammar: collections, variations, and multiple authorships coexist within a recognisable DNA. Furniture design works through families of forms, not through single standards. Technological design, by contrast, has often presented itself as neutral and universal, producing series rather than differences. But neutrality, when it becomes a global standard, ends up generating homogenisation.

With Mauro Porcini, the conversation always tends to widen. Within a few minutes, one moves from Umberto Eco to Pirandello, from the Bauhaus to Memphis, and then back to Alessandro Michele. He recalls that when he was in his first year at university, he read The Absent Structure by Umberto Eco and began to think of design as an act of communication before it was a formal exercise. In those pages, he says, he also encountered Roman Jakobson, “the grammar for defining meaning,” a model that over the years helped him think of design as the construction of messages, codes, and contexts, not just objects. “Designers do not design products. They design meaning.”

Mauro Porcini

Porcini is the first non-Korean president in Samsung’s history. Appointed Chief Design Officer exactly one year ago, before arriving in Korea he held the same role at 3M and PepsiCo, leading transformations that affected the language of brands as much as their products. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, Samsung had already begun to show what could become his vision for the group’s design. Educated at the Politecnico di Milano, and also a student of Andrea Branzi, he has built a career between Europe and the United States: a trajectory that brings together Italian design culture and American industrial pragmatism.

In Korea, meanwhile, he says he found a different kind of energy, a country that in just a few decades went from a developing economy to a global technological power. Between Silicon Valley and a rising China, South Korea stands out as an underdog to watch: less narrative, more industrial discipline. It is within this geopolitical triangulation that he places Samsung today.

Founded in 1938, Samsung has moved through postwar poverty, industrialisation, globalisation, the digital revolution, and now artificial intelligence. “The problem with many brands is that they say: this is my heritage, this is my DNA, I cannot change it. But the world changes around you, and you become irrelevant.” Mauro Porcini’s proposal is not rupture, but continuous translation. “You have to remain faithful to yourself, but find a formula that projects you into the future.”

This is where Porcini introduces what for him is the true field of design today: giving technology back a human dimension. “For me, Samsung has to become more and more the human side of tech.” This does not mean adding emotional warmth after the fact to products already defined, but starting from the human being even before technology or business. “Before business, before technology, we have to put the human being.”

Design understood not as styling, then, but as an organisational culture. “Designers are ambassadors of the human being.” They must speak the language of technology and that of business, but constantly remember who they are designing for.

Mauro Porcini

When he speaks about the future and scenarios with a high rate of artificial intelligence, Porcini avoids either naive enthusiasm or alarmism. If technology frees up time, the question becomes what to do with that time. “Technology can free you. The question is what you do with that freedom.” In a scenario in which traditional work changes shape, the project is not only industrial but social: how identities, relationships, and meaning are redefined.

This is where his vision moves away from pure product innovation and becomes anthropological reflection. “The greatest design project will be designing how people will live and find happiness in a different society.”

“I have millions of photos of my children. I have almost nothing of my grandfather when he was a child,” the designer says, explaining that today we accumulate millions of digital traces of our lives. Artificial intelligence could transform this archive into active memory, continuity of knowledge. We are not talking about mystical immortality, but we are brushing up against hypotheses of permanence in narrative.

Mauro Porcini

Ultimately, even the mechanical watch he wears on his right wrist speaks of this. It is not only an object that measures time: it is an object that moves through time. It can be handed down, pass from one generation to the next, carrying memory and identity with it.

Before business, before technology, he insists, comes the human being. “Design is an act of love.” Not a romantic gesture, but a structural principle: to design means taking care of the way people will live within the technology we build.

In the end, one returns to the two watches. They represent neither nostalgia nor blind faith in the digital, but a possibility: to choose, to combine, to attribute meaning. The question, then, is not how far Samsung can be taken in the years to come, but what idea of human being and society one chooses to accompany along that path. The two watches do not just tell the time. They mark a position.