Federico Casalegno: Samsung EVP and MIT Design Lab founder on what 20,000 years of human creativity means for design today

Design Better

Federico Casalegno, Samsung's EVP and founder of the MIT Design Lab, shares how human storytelling and social science inform his approach to design. Drawing

Key takeaways

• Design should not follow technological capability but instead guide it toward improving human lives.
• Technology without humanity is perfection without purpose—design must center emotional intelligence and human imagination.

Main topics

• Human-centered design
• The role of storytelling in technology

Notable quotes

Technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose.

Conclusion

Federico Casalegno's journey from social science to global design leadership

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) We are all trained to see the world with a certain lens. So it's really a challenge to be in the same room and trying to be in someone else's shoes, empathize with our colleagues and see they can have different approaches or they see problems in a different way that we see, but eventually absolutely very useful. So really crossing the boundaries of discipline is a fundamental element to run creative work. Speaker 2 (0:28) When Samsung's CEO asked Federico Casalegno to redesign the cameras on the company's phones, Federico told him he was the wrong person for the job. He wasn't an optical engineer. He didn't understand cameras. What he understood was storytelling. And he pointed to the Lascaux Caves in France, where people were marking walls 20,000 years ago for the same reason we hold up our phones today. To capture a moment and tell it to someone we love. That's the kind of answer you get from a designer who arrived by way of studying human society. 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 90s, back when cross-disciplinary wasn't yet a word anyone put on a job posting. Speaker 3 (1:23) 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. They use thousands of 3D and 4D scans across real demographics, then simulate millions of variations to figure out how an earbud should fit. Then they strap the buds onto robots and make them run. Then they test with actual humans because at some point, a person still has to decide what comfortable means. There's a phrase that Federico kept returning to. Technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose. The designer's role is the problem-making first. You've got to understand the problem. Then comes the problem-solving later. We also get into how critique works inside a company that speaks a dozen native languages, what he actually looks for when hiring, and the French philosopher who, at 102, looked at his calendar and said he was booked until next year. Speaker 2 (2:20) This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Speaker 3 (2:25) Eli Wilder. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, You'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. Speaker 2 (3:09) The Speaker 3 (3:09) podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, just shoot us an email at subscriptions at thecuriositydepartment.com. We'll help you out. We'll return to the conversation after this Speaker 1 (3:31) quick break. Speaker 3 (3:39) And now, back to the show. Speaker 2 (3:46) Federico Castellanio, welcome to Design Better. Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me. We're quite excited to have you here. You have a very interesting background. So you have a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne, and you happen to be in Paris right now. You spent two decades at MIT, and now you're running design at a large consumer electronics company, Samsung. What was the moment that you realized that being a social scientist was actually the thing that made you a better designer? Speaker 1 (4:12) Since the moment I started. doing my PhD in sociology and communication science. I've been always interested in how human communication was mediated through medium technologies. So back then, mid-90s, I was doing a lot of work on what we call bulletin board system, BBS. Basically, pre-internet. And my interest was not, of course, in 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 3D 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. So you have this phrase Speaker 3 (5:09) that really struck us, technology without humanity is merely perfection without purpose. Curious where that comes from. And was there some moment in your design process or maybe even the work you were doing at MIT where Speaker 1 (5:22) that developed? Technology without humanity is perfection without purpose. Basically embrace at least two things. The first one is that I'm deeply, deeply concerned by humans, by people. So my work is really trying to understand how we can design in order to improve the quality of the lives of people across a variety of areas. So first of all, how do we bring humanity in what we do? And two, while I'm deeply fascinated by the potential and possibility of the development of technologies, we're not in the R &D business, let's say. R &D is really trying to push the boundaries and the limits of technology and innovation, and that's perfectly fine. We love that. But our role is really to bend the technological development into what technology should do in order to improve