Originally launched as a product design studio for North America in 1994, the SDIC will merge with a new user-experience research arm to expand its role from designing products mostly individually to designing multi-device user-experiences. The mission of the SDIC will be to contribute to creating stronger insights based on a deep understanding of consumer lifestyle trends, as well as adapting to the changing trends and emerging lifestyle patterns of local markets. The center will also play an important role of envisioning product concepts that do not exist today and assist in the launch of those products to market. The SDIC is part of the Corporate Design Center, located in Seoul, and one of seven Samsung design studios globally.

Dr. Federico Casalegno, who has extensive experience as a designer and a social scientist at MIT, has recently joined Samsung Electronics. Dr. Casalegno’s expertise and interests lie in the impact of networked digital technologies on human behavior and society.

“In this age of connected devices, it is imperative that a designer understands and considers the cross-device user experience for every design element of a product, because most products no longer serve a standalone purpose anymore.” said Dr. Federico Casalegno, head of SDIC. “Our mission is to understand people and lifestyles to deliver meaningful experiences, through beautiful yet functional design, enabled by innovative cutting-edge technologies. With a talented team of multi-disciplinary designers, the SDIC will seek to leverage insights from the North American market and tap into the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial spirit to design inspiring products and experiences.”

“At Samsung, we recognize that our design and innovation have to be meaningful to people. It has to help people do more. User experiences must involve awareness of the other devices around them and work together. This is what consumers expect today,” said Don Tae Lee, head of the Corporate Design Center. “With the launch of the new center, we are establishing the framework to deliver that sort of experience to people across all our consumer devices.”

For example, in the home, when a user wakes up in the morning on a rainy day, the home lights will gradually brighten, while music fit for a rainy day is selected and played in the background. A cup of coffee will be prepared as soon as the user says “coffee” while stepping into the kitchen and the refrigerator will also recommend meal ideas for the day, asking the user whether he or she would like to buy ingredients online.

In the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, Samsung Electronics is uniquely positioned to bring this world of connected AI services to life, based on the almost half a billion connected devices the company sells every year. In fact, given the typical lifecycle of a device, there are more than a billion Samsung devices actively used around the world at any given time.

Samsung’s device portfolio also is the industry’s broadest, and includes mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and wearable devices, office devices such as PCs, signages and Samsung Flip, devices for the home such as Samsung Smart TVs, Family Hub and FlexWash and FlexDry, and much more.

At this year’s CES, Samsung highlighted its latest innovations in its vision to drive the Internet of Things (IoT) supported by AI. Samsung Smart TVs now integrated with Bixby, are able to play music and shows personalized for users, as well as show who is at the front door or what is inside the refrigerator. The Family Hub refrigerator, also integrated with AI, recognizes the voices of different family members and provides each of them with a personalized daily schedule.

Moving forward, Samsung will continue to remain focused on holistically integrating AI into a connected setting, such as the home or the office, in contrast to other players primarily pursuing implementation of AI on a few devices and services. In the following months, Samsung will integrate not only Samsung devices, but also IoT devices and sensors developed by external partners into the SmartThings eco-system, allowing a single SmartThings app to control everything. Furthermore, Samsung also plans to integrate AI into all its connected devices by 2020.

In the coming years, many IoT devices with AI support will generate a vast array of usage patterns and scenarios. How AI-enabled devices learn and analyze complex usage patterns and provide consumers with the most optimized options will be critical to the success of AI technology for the near future. In other words, the success of AI will boil down to how well the devices understand the users.

Therefore, Samsung’s perspective on AI is to build an eco-system that is user-centric rather than device-centric. To pursue that goal, we will start by building an AI platform under a common architecture that will not only scale quickly, but also provide the deepest understanding of usage context and behaviors, making AI more relevant and useful.

For the past decades, Samsung successfully introduced products and innovations by researching the lifestyle and behavior of global consumers. Paying respect to our heritage of user-centric product development, Samsung will begin an exciting journey open to boundless possibilities in new user experiences by integrating AI into the open IoT ecosystem it is currently developing. This journey will certainly be fascinating for us here at Samsung, but even more so for consumers, as Samsung takes major steps forward to bring consumers’ hopes and expectations to life.

by Larry Heck

Senior Vice President, Samsung Research America (SRA)