Philips Design

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 nineties, back when cross-disciplinary wasn't yet a word anyone put on a job posting.

We 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.

So back then, mid-nineties, I was doing a lot of work on what we call bulletin board system, BBS, basically, uh, pre-internet.

And my interest was not on the... 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 Philips 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, so it was basically from the beginning of my career, I would say.