Ten years ago, New Zealand native Reuben Staines was a Kiwi abroad—living more than 6,000 miles from his home in the South Pacific. Following his graduation from Massey University, he moved to Seoul in 2002 to take a job as a Korea Times reporter. Now a senior manager of strategic content for Samsung Electronics, Staines reflects back on the move, and how it eventually led him to an exciting career at Samsung.

After four years at The Korea Times, Staines decided to apply for a role at Cheil, a marketing subsidiary of the Samsung Group, despite the fact that – in his own words – it “went against the grain” of his former journalism career.

“I had dreamed of working for a big brand, despite it being in the opposite direction of my career path,” said Staines. “And Cheil must have seen value in my unique background and global perspective, because they hired me as an account executive on their PR team.”

Staines quickly found that his career trajectory had taken on an incredibly fast-paced life of its own—much like the Samsung business environment he encountered. With Cheil, he helped forge a corporate brand identity for Samsung TV, before being offered a role on the client side.

In 2008, Staines was transferred to Samsung Electronics, where he worked with the international media and a global PR network.

“I could speak Korean pretty well,” he said. “But realistically, I didn’t have to use it that often. Samsung is such a globalized company that even the Koreans who worked in the Seoul headquarters spoke English fluently.”

Though he began his career before Samsung truly took off as a leading international brand, Staines said he understands why people consider it to be such a compelling place to work. In addition to fostering a truly global environment, Samsung makes a point of becoming a leader in every market it targets, two characteristics Staines believes many job-seekers find very attractive.

In 2012, Staines made the move to the United States to work with the Enterprise Business Division. Though he had spent the last six years on the planning side of PR, he was excited to find that this new role gave him the chance to execute strategy, once again paving the way for a new chapter in his career.

“Within just 10 years at one company I’ve had the opportunities to live abroad, explore my interests and strengths, and be a part of the innovative processes that make Samsung a true one-of-a-kind,” he explained. “Our employees are unusually versatile. Their ability to pivot and change direction without losing a step is unique for a company as big as this.”

Today, Staines is still a New Zealander abroad, leading the development of strategic content to drive demand across Samsung’s enterprise offerings in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. He is also, not-so-coincidentally, the managing editor of Samsung Business Insights—a blog that highlights the company’s work throughout the business sector. It all goes to show that even after moving to South Korea and embarking on his incredible Samsung career, he still has not forgotten the path that brought him there in the first place.

Sergei Sudakov, a young software engineer, considers his position a dream job—generating ideas and solutions. The more far-out the better. The 27-year-old research engineer, from the R&D team of Samsung Electronics’ Visual Display Business, plays a pivotal role in developing advanced software to enable the next generation of consumer electronics visual display products and services.

“We work on the advanced stuff, the stuff no one knows about yet,” said Sudakov. “Maybe some of it will be implemented in one year or five years from now. Or, maybe it won’t be used at all.”

“We work on the advanced stuff,

the stuff no one knows about yet,”

Solutions That Work

Working primarily in algorithm research and technology planning, Sudakov might spend an entire week reading scientific journals or watching hours of TV content. His work can also go in surprising new directions.

Take his involvement in Sports Mode, for example. This Samsung Smart TV feature utilizes video and audio processing to record game highlights and optimizes the picture by enhancing the vividness and sharpness of the playing field. Its Stadium Sound component lets viewers feel as if they’re actually sitting in the crowd and watching the game. While working on this unique TV mode, Sudakov figured out how to make an entirely different feature work.

Various teams had been trying to come up with a sports-related feature that would allow someone to change channels during the commercials of a game, but be notified when the game resumes. Sudakov was able to improve on their efforts and thought up a new way for the smart TV to analyze the channels with the sporting event, which allowed the function to work properly.

“Sometimes the problems are obvious and easy to fix,” he said. “But sometimes it takes days to find the root of the issue. Even if you know where the problem is, it isn’t always immediately evident how to solve or even slightly improve it. But when your solution works, you can feel really proud.”

Sci-Fi Becomes Reality

Sudakov says he is sometimes personally inspired by science fiction. A big fan of the genre, he just finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune for the third time and watched the latest Star Wars installment on the first day it was released. “Sometimes when I see certain technologies in science fiction, I think about how I could re-create them, and occasionally, I can even come up with an answer,” he said.

Not all of the seemingly imaginary technology of Hollywood blockbusters is fiction, however. Machine learning, for example, is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed, and is one of Sudakov’s interests. The concept was a big theme in films such as Ex Machina, Her, and Transcendence, where computers learn to think for themselves and even develop human emotions. While the concept may seem farfetched, the technology is already being utilized in smartphone voice recognition, web search engines and self-driving cars—technologies that are becoming more and more commonplace. “There’s so much machine learning in the modern world that people use it dozens of times per day without even knowing it,” Sudakov said. “The technology will outperform humans very soon.”

But it’s not there yet and there are still plenty of kinks to be worked out. Overcoming these obstacles can be an arduous task for software and research engineers like Sudakov, who spend their days going through endless trial-and-error, reading, fine-tuning their developing skills and constantly learning more in an attempt to keep up with the current research. “This is what research is all about—searching for regularities in data and ways to use them to create a solution,” Sudakov said. “There’s no one perfect answer. Even if I have an answer, there’s always a better one that I don’t know about yet.”

Keeping It Interesting

Sudakov’s quest for knowledge began at a very young age in his hometown of Khimki, Russia—a city that became home to several Soviet aerospace development centers after World War II. Like many residents of the area, both his parents are aerospace engineers, and as such, Sudakov often found himself surrounded by the sciences growing up. As a child, he used to attend the annual International Aviation and Space Show in Moscow as an unofficial exhibition member with his father.

“All of the exhibitors were surprised to see a small child there, so they would let me experience all the cool stuff, like the flight training and war simulators,” he recalled.

His interest didn’t turn to software development, though, until his high school years, when a young and enthusiastic informatics teacher changed the way he looked at computers. That professor focused the class curriculum on more “absorbing” subjects, such as 3D modeling and real programming—areas that required creativity in addition to technical know-how.

One of the more influential moments that made Sudakov realize his career aspirations was when he and his classmates were encouraged to participate in a creative engineering competition. Guided by his teacher, he learned how to program images and animations, then was given the freedom to create his own program. Sudakov earned a third-place prize for his virtual fortune telling ball, which provided random answers to people’s questions about their future. “My professor taught us that everything you do should be interesting,” Sudakov said. “If it’s not interesting, you will never be able to do your best. If you want to do something special, you must make it interesting in the first place.”

 “If it’s not interesting,

you will never be able to do your best.

If you want to do something special,

you must make it interesting

in the first place.”

Before graduating, he began working as a research developer at his university’s Graphics and Media Lab, working primarily in computer vision, a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information. After two additional stints in the same field, he was recruited by Samsung to research and generate ideas and solutions for various visual display products and services.

Predicting the Future

Currently, Sudakov’s team is creating systems that will allow consumers to communicate with their televisions in new, simplified ways. Rather than being a device solely used for viewing content, Sudakov hopes the television will be a connected, integrated appliance that can do all the things users need them to do. Soon enough, he believes, the TV will understand much more about the content it displays, will be voice-activated, and could potentially play a central role in the Internet of Things.

But considering that these features, as well as the products and services his team is working on, won’t be available for some time, it can be extremely difficult to anticipate what kinds of technology consumers actually want and need.

“I think it’s very inspirational to be a part of such a rapidly changing world and I hope to use my knowledge to make it an even better place. Even if just a few people look at what I’ve done and say, ‘Wow! This is the future!’ then I’ll be happy.”

Despite being from Bihar, a rural province in northeastern India, Mayank Mohan was surprised how little he really knew about his home country before he joined Samsung. “I grew up in Bihar, and I went to university in Delhi, but that was it,” he said. “The first time I traveled by plane was when I came to Korea. The first time I saw the ocean was on that flight.”

After joining the Digital Appliances Business at Samsung Electronics as a product manager in 2010, he began to learn. Mohan was assigned to the product management team, developing refrigerators for India (along with Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka).

Learning About India as a Product Manager

As a product manager, meeting new people is an essential part of unlocking the nuances and patterns of the region, visiting people’s homes and getting feedback from business partners and local sales teams. Whereas once he had not really known India and perhaps taken it for granted, his job at Samsung quickly caused him to truly learn about his country and its great diversity.

Mohan soon discovered how something as simple as color can vary widely from area to area. In Mumbai, consumers prefer Western-style refrigerators, according to Mohan. In northern India, people prefer smooth, soft colors like silver. But in the south, dark colors do best, like wine red or green. In the east, more traditional colors are most popular. Pebble blue is liked around the country. Reds and fanciful colors are popular in general around India, so Mohan and Samsung tried unusual hues like rich yellow and light green, generating plenty of attention for the unconventional choices and further developing the market by experimenting with new possibilities.

Samsung was also a pioneer with patterns, offering colorful floral patterns on refrigerators since 2006. “Flower patterns, like on a woman’s sari, are appreciated on the refrigerator doors,” he said. And while other types of patterns have been tried, none have found the popularity of flowers. “We will keep trying to offer special designs that nobody else is.”

One of the biggest challenges consumers face around the region is irregular power supplies. To help consumers protect their food from spoiling when the power goes out, Samsung developed the Cool Pack for freezers, which at first were good for just an hour, but eventually improved to keep the freezer cold for 12 hours.

Understanding these needs and interests took countless hours of research, but Mohan saw how they are all important parts of localization. “India is a market that is still full of potential,” he said. “And localization is crucial to this market.”

Always on the Front Lines

Another difference around the region is how people use their refrigerators. In Bangladesh, where meat is a bigger part of the diet, larger freezers are necessary. But in much of India, people eat less meat, don’t eat ice cream or use ice often and prefer room temperature water. In visiting one home, Mohan noticed that the freezer was actually empty.

“The marketing team is always on the front lines…”

This simple observation soon led to another unique local feature. Mohan was dispatched to the local team for three months, and together they came up with a refrigerator that had what they termed a “Convertible” function. The top section of the refrigerator could be used to store frozen items or converted into a cooling area like the main compartment for keeping foods fresh.

It was an idea they developed in 2012, but even good ideas have to wait until the time is right to be implemented. Back then, the Convertible function was too expensive to support, however, the Samsung team has determined the market is ready now, so this new feature is giving consumers around the region a useful new option to suit their lifestyles with an affordable technology.

“The marketing team is always on the front lines in the market,” Mohan said. “As a product manager, I have to care for the product from birth to death. I have to ensure the right product will be available at the right time. The most important and difficult thing to find is ‘What is the right product and the right time?’”

Every Day Is a New Challenge

“I’m active. I hate routine jobs,” he said. “And one of the best things at Samsung, when you come in the morning, you don’t know how your day will end. I like the dynamism. Every day is a new challenge, a new task, meeting new people.”

“It’s up to me to be the initiator. I like that kind of empowerment.”

Since starting his career at Samsung, he credits the words of his mentor for his approach to work: “Be good and be seen.” “If you do good work, but nobody knows it, it doesn’t matter. But if you do bad work and everybody knows it, you’ll get fired. And if you don’t do good work and nobody knows, then you need a new job,” he said with a laugh.

For Mohan, the work and travel as a Product Manager is challenging, but he says he likes the energy of his job. “At Samsung, it’s up to me to be the initiator. I like that kind of empowerment.”

What’s Next?

The job of improving products is never done. Spending so much time with refrigerators has also helped re-inspire his own love for cooking, which in turn has helped him understand his product better. “With such a long connection with refrigerators, I know what to store where, for the best effect,” he said. “As a chef at home, I am really sensitive to how my refrigerator works, and it gives me many ideas to improve them and make them more user-friendly.”

Mohan said that cooking also helps him bond with his teammates and others, noting that his mushroom curry, fried rice and bhujia potato wedges are particularly popular.

“The IoT is going to change everything.”

But what really excited Mohan is the Internet of Things, which is coming to home appliances, including refrigerators. “For the last 100 years, home appliances haven’t changed that much,” he said. “You have cooling machines and heating machines and cleaning machines. But the IoT is going to change everything. What you’ve seen so far, it’s really just the beginning. Trust me, the changes in the next five years are going to be amazing.”

Coming from a family with a long tradition in the arts, Jean-Christophe Naour learned from an early age the importance of precision in design. “We all can come up with the same ideas, but details determine how we craft our ideas,” he said. “Details make design.”

But he also loves chaos, and believes in the importance of leaving your comfort zone. “The brain is really abstract, and inspiration comes from the unexpected. You have to break out of your comfort zone. You need to be prepared to fail.”

Naour has won awards and critical praise over the years for his experimental approach to uniting those competing influences, using computer algorithms to create apps and artworks that produce striking images and patterns. And for the past four years, Naour has applied his unique mix of design ideas at Samsung Electronics in the Visual Display Business, as part of the team that shapes the advanced design and user interface of screens and related devices. “I’m really excited about creating new interactive experiences that connect products to their users through inventive blends of technology and storytelling,” he said.

“You have to break out of your comfort zone. You need to be prepared to fail.”

Pushing Boundaries for Inspiration

For Naour, his fascination with design started early, growing up in Brittany, France. His father’s side of the family has worked in woodworking and furniture for generations, while his mother’s side of the family was involved in fashion. He grew up creating, too, first with Lego and building blocks, then with computers. “I was in love with graphics and the general aesthetics of the whole thing—the colors, the pixels, the fonts,” he said.

He went to Nantes University to study mathematics and computer science, but he thought it was not a good fit for him and after a couple of years transferred into an industrial design program, getting his Master’s Degree at the L’École de Design Nantes Atlantique.

But when the time came to spend a semester abroad (a requirement of his design program), Naour was less interested in the usual choices, like the United States or Great Britain. “I wanted to take a risk, and push my boundaries for inspiration,” he said. So instead he came to Hongik University in Seoul. “I knew nothing about Korea at the time, but it sounded exciting.”

He took advantage of his time in Korea to explore the country all he could, visiting 20 cities over the course of the semester. So after he finished graduate school, he really wanted to return to Korea, and eagerly took a position at a design firm in Seoul. After several years there, Samsung made him an offer, and he began a new career.

Going Abstract to Understand the User Experience

Naour started with Smart TV, working on the interactive gesture interface, and he has had a hand in many projects since then, with a task force system that rotates designers regularly.

As part of Visual Display design team, he usually works on devices from the early phases, building a road map for how users will experience every aspect. Typically, they are presented with a product early on and then brainstorm for how the interface might work. “At first, nothing is very specific,” he said. “But gradually you build a wireframe and interface concepts, then a skin, and then you sync your ideas with the product developers.”

Usually a product will have dozens of “modules,” or subareas within the UX, that all have to be coordinated and approved, making development very complicated. But one of Naour’s favorite projects was actually one of the most straightforward—all the lineup of Wireless Audio 360, which only had two modules, the speaker and the app. The speakers were developed with U.S. office. But once the hardware was ready, Naour and the Seoul design team had to come up with the guide for how people would use the speaker. They knew the speaker would have a cylindrical shape and an LED interface, but the other details on how the product would function was up to Naour and the Seoul design team.

They responded with a series of workshops over three weeks, looking to define the core interactions and user’s journey, all through a series of swipes and taps. “Our response was to reduce the details.

We wanted something more artistic, where the actions would flow,” Naour said. “something more abstract.”

They responded with a series of workshops over three weeks, looking to define the core interactions and user’s journey, all through a series of swipes and taps. “Our response was to reduce the details. We wanted something more artistic, where the actions would flow,” Naour said. “something more abstract.”

The final result was an elegant interface, where users could control everything about the wireless speaker with just a few simple swipes right on the flat top of the speaker.

Failure Is Crucial for Innovation

Over his career as a designer, Naour has developed many big ideas about how to approach design and creativity. “I don’t like to say ‘I don’t know’,” he said. “I prefer to try doing something myself and learn from my mistakes until I can make it happen.”

It’s an unorthodox approach that Samsung encourages. “In France, we have a low tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity, so we are reluctant to take risks,” he said. “But failure is crucial in innovation. The faster you find weakness, the faster you can improve what needs fixing.”

Another significant part of his success as a designer is maintaining work-life balance. Getting out of the office to listen to music or play with his 2-year-old daughter is important to keeping his thinking fresh and creative. “Go outside. You need to break your perspective.”

“I don’t like to say ‘I don’t know.’ I prefer trying things myself until I can make it happen.”

Naour says watching his daughter play is also a great way to learn about UX technology. “I’m amazed at how young children love new technology. Even at 1 year old, they can already unlock the phone,” he said. “I think technology is like a language. It’s like they’re learning to live in an augmented reality.”

The Art of the Algorithm

As a self-professed “workaholic,” Naour notes that even when he is not at work, he is always working on design ideas. One of his favorite approaches is using algorithms. “Design is, by definition, iterative,” he said. “With algorithms, you can start off with some basic shapes, give them rules, then the computer can come up tens of thousands of variations, all based on the same concept—always different and unpredictable.”

Over the years, Naour has won much recognition for his own creative algorithms, artworks and apps, appearing in such places as Wired, Gizmodo, The Creator’s Project and IdN Magazine. But Naour says he is most proud of the FWA (Favorite Website Award) he won in 2011 for his app Poly—a program that turn users photos and drawings into geometric arrays of color, reducing images down to their essential polygons.

“FWA is like a symbol in the interactive design industry” he said. “When I was still a student, it was for me the most inspiring place on the web, at the early stages of creative Flash websites. It represented the quality I wanted to produce.”

Designing an Interactive Future

As technology grows ever more refined, fast and complex, increasingly it is the role of the UX designer to define how consumers interact with products, get the most from them and ultimately feel about them. “New technologies are radically expanding the design space,” he said. “Just a few years back, almost any kind of interaction was all about the screen, keyboard and mouse. Now, the degrees of freedom are increasing, and so too are the design choices.”

It has only been a few years since multi-touch has been on the market, and technology interfaces are continuing to grow more sophisticated very quickly. Naour says he loves seeing where all these developments are leading. “Every major milestone in the evolution of UX design has involved an interaction between technology and human beings.” he said. “While we use all our senses in everyday life, we are still limited to one or two at most in our digital life. The next interfaces should take full advantage of our complex bodies, to make communications even more natural.”

“New technologies are radically expanding the design space… Now, the degrees of freedom are increasing, and so too are the design choices.”

And that constant sense of challenge and exploration is what makes designing UX interfaces at Samsung so worthwhile. “It has been an exciting adventure,” Naour said, “and I get to work with some really great people”