Designer TVs

In an age where celebrity designers such as Philippe Starck and Michael Graves are collaborating with already established brand names such as BMW (Starck) and Target (Graves for small appliances), Samsung Electronics likes to stick to its own designers. And with good reason.

Dr. David G. Steel, vice president of Samsung Electronics and the first non-Korean to take a regular executive position in the company, says, "Design is such an important part of the company that we feel it should be mainly done internally. Design is how you create a common identity, a common message. The design of your products is one of the most important opportunities you have to communicate with your customers, so why outsource that?"

Indeed, Samsung has been reaping awards left and right for its design innovations. In fact, in the past few years it has received so many design awards (21 awards – five of them IDE or Industrial Design Excellence Award, eight Red Dot and eight IF awards from Germany) for its products that it’s now at par with Apple Computers in terms of number of awards received.

Design is not only anymore what the product looks like, but the whole user interface – the menu, the controls. It’s no longer serves just an aesthetic function, but a very practical one, too.

At the Samsung Design Center in Seoul, we saw one of their awardwinning products – the new DLP TV with DNIe technology (Digital Natural Image engine) and SRS (Tru Surround XT), which will soon be launched in Southeast Asia. Samsung senior manager of the design group for visual display Kim Youngjun, who led the team that designed the projection TV, explained that the new model SP50L7HX was largely a design innovation rather than a technological one. They didn’t change much technology-wise, but, oh, how radical the projection TV looks compared with past models!

Before the team embarked on the project, they did research on interior design trends, particularly in Scandinavia. They also wanted to treat the new TV not as a piece of electronic box, but as a piece of furniture – something that would give the living room as much character as a chair would.

The biggest design challenge was that all projection TV had their "engines" at the bottom, making them look like lumbering giants. The designers wanted to place the console in a vertical manner and introduce smaller, high-performance speakers on the sides.

"Samsung is known for quality and we wanted to have a new design to differentiate ourselves," he says. "That was the starting point – a good design."

The designers came up with a unique vertical engine that enabled them to develop a slim, sleek design, which makes it fit comfortably in the same category as flat panel TV. The LCD control panel on this model is very convenient and has an elegant look, with a smiley face coming up while the TV is starting. With this new model, released in January 2004, Samsung introduced its latest proprietary image enhancement technology: DNIe, which produces superior image quality.

Samsung Electronics has 450 designers, 30 percent of whom are women (and 30 percent of those are product designers). While they don’t make a distinction between the genders, Kim says that the women are very much detail-oriented and that many of the company’s LCD monitors were designed by them.

Samsung’s design philosophy is expressed thus: "Balance of reason and feeling." Its design language resonates with simplicity, harmony and a strong identity.

Its human resources management also looks at the big picture: It recruits young design students as interns, exposing them to how the company works and at the same time getting fresh ideas from the synergy they provide. As they stay longer in the company, they are given more opportunities to join programs and be part of an outstanding design pool. After eight to 10 years, the average time "when designers get bored" doing the same thing, they are dispatched to design consulting firms or a universities in the US, Europe or Asia to pursue a master’s or doctorate degree.

For the DLP TV, 45 designers worked under Kim with three foreign designers from the UK and Japan.

"We spent six months planning the design, 30 days for the minor changes and another 60 days to adapt the new features," he says.

Kim says that up till the early 1990s. Samsung’s designers were one hundred percent industrial designers because they did only the exterior part of the products. But since the mid-1990s, Samsung’s corporate executives had a change of vision – they wanted to integrate technology and design in the reorganization. While 60 percent are still IDs, and 20 percent are interface designers, the rest have such diverse backgrounds, ranging from graphic design to physics, engineering, fine arts and literature.

Samsung is spending $3.3 billion in R&D this year alone, an increase from last year’s $2.9 billion (with sales totaling $54 billion and $5 billion net income) and $2.5 billion in 2001.

No wonder the company has risen in rank in virtually every category, from World’s Best Brands to World’s Top Chipmakers. No wonder, too, it is able to produce such technological and design innovations – from MP3 players the size of a lipstick to LCD monitors that can bend 180 degrees to gorgeous Plasma TVs and LCD TVs.

David Steel says you can find a Samsung TV in distinguished places in the world, like the White House in the US, the Blue House in South Korea (the presidential palace), the Pompidou Center in France, the European Parliament and the Beijing Subway, in countless airports, and of course, at the recently concluded 2004 Olympics in Athens (and, in 2008, at the Olympics in Beijing – they’ve got that deal locked already).

Samsung has risen from a black-and-white TV producer in the 1970s when it hit the US market to a quality brand producing high-end products. We tell David Steel that when Samsung was introduced in the Philippines in the 1980s (or was it earlier?), it was seen as a cheaper alternative to Sony.

Steel doesn’t disagree. The truth is, back in those days, Samsung was a little known brand from Korea catering to the low to middle market. But in the past years, it has drastically changed its image. Today, its production is only 10 percent CRT TVs (the bulky TVs of the old) and 90 percent is LCD, projection and Plasma TVs.

"We are not trying to compete with the local players in the CRT market," he says. "We do not want to be in that level again. We want to have superior products, high quality, good design and technology. We invest so much more in R&D than other companies. How are we going to recoup that investment? We can only do it through premium products, high-quality brands."

Is he saying the only way you can be a "brand" is if you go upmarket? "We don’t want to become an exclusive brand. We still want to be a brand that appeals to the majority of people, but we want to be a brand that represents high-quality products, new technology, good user interface, but still accessible. We don’t want to cater only to the top one percent. We want to be an aspiration brand, a brand that any consumer would want to own."

The same goes for its monitors. Its award-winning team says that CDT monitors (those behemoths occupying so much space on your computer desk) will all disappear in the very near future to be replaced by LCD monitors. But in terms of market demand, Samsung will be producing them perhaps "only for the next three years."

So what’s next for Samsung’s display technology? Expect the second generation DNIe, now already under development. It is expected to be a groundbreaking image enhancing technology, improved by over 50 percent in noise reduction from the current DNIe. It is also continuing its collaboration with Sony, still its biggest competitor. "Partnership will continue in upstream field, but in down-stream field, competitive relations will be maintained. There is no cooperation with any set company at present, but possibly we’re wide open for any player in that field if constructive plan comes up. We’re also developing slimmer flat display products that will be released in 2005."

In Southeast Asia, Samsung plans to change its main product from curved TV to premium products (PDP, LCD TV and DLP TV), aiming for top market share in the region.

Let the race for your living room begin!