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Over the past decade, Korea's Samsung Electronics has transformed itself from a copycat producer of uninspiring goods into one of the world's top consumer-electronics brands. Much of that transformation is due to a shift in power at the company from engineers to designers. Samsung's rebirth has inspired other Korean companies to place a greater emphasis on design -- in fact, it has energized the country's design community.
One of the keenest observers of this renaissance has been Lee Kun Pyo, director of the Human-Centered Interaction Design Laboratory at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology. BusinessWeek Asia Editor David Rocks and Seoul Bureau Chief Moon Ihlwan recently sat down with Lee in a Seoul Chinese restaurant to share plates of roasted eggplant, grilled shrimp, and fried tofu while discussing the changes sweeping Korean design. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:
Is Samsung the best example of Korean design? Samsung is doing very well, but other Korean design is getting very good, too, especially those products that have a very short lifecycle.
Why are Koreans better at short-lifecycle products than long? According to the Western view, you need to systematically collect lots of data and try to find patterns and a set of principles before starting your design. And this takes a lot of time, so you tend to stick with those principles. This really fits in well with products with a long lifecycle.
But Koreans traditionally don't articulate what they're doing beforehand. They're very contextual. Of course they do customer research and product planning and user-centered design and so on. But they quickly arrive at solutions, then look at the solution to find any further problems. Some might say that's unsystematic, but it's really very dynamic. And it works well for products with a short lifecycle, like mobile phones or MP3 players.
Is there a big difference between Korean design and the design coming out of Japan and China? There are subtle differences. It's not only design -- there's a pattern of differences among the cultures. In food, the Japanese keep things very simple, Korean food is very hot, Chinese is very greasy. In colors, Japan is very monochrome. Korea is a little bit red. And China is red and gold.
In Japanese traditional music there's almost no sound. Korea's is a little bit noisier, and Chinese opera is very loud. The same goes for the communication mode. In Japan, when people finish speaking there's a little pause, then the other person replies. In Korea, people are a little faster, and in China they all overlap. All those things are visible in aesthetics. Japanese products don't violate the horizontal and vertical, but Korean design is a little bit more dynamic. And in China, it's very busy.
Does today's Korean design reflect Korean cultural traditions? Culture is always changing. Many young designers think that if something looks like ancient armor or a pagoda, it's cultural design. But that's not the real sense of vernacular design. You can't adapt traditional forms or shapes for modern products. Instead, you need to find the spirit of the culture.
So you may not see Korean culture in, say, a Samsung phone vs. a Motorola (MOT) phone? You can't necessarily see it in the color or the shape, but broadly speaking there's a flexibility that influences the problem-solving approach. Every company has a set of interface guidelines -- big books of rules that mobile devices are supposed to follow. At Motorola, they sometimes blindly follow the guidelines, which leads to strange interface design.
Although those guidelines exist in Korea, sometimes context overrides the principle. I remember driving in Chicago once at 1:00 in the morning. At a red light, the cars would stop and wait. But Koreans look at the context. The rule is that you stop for red. But if it's the middle of the night, you look around, and if there's no one there, you go. That's the context. The rules can change. Design, too, is context-dependent. And that will work to Korea's advantage.
In an era when Samsung, Sony (SNE), Motorola, and Nokia (NOK) are all creating products for the global market, does it matter whether a company follows the design tradition of the country where it's based? We have a cultural identity, but we should also follow the global standard. Even though Western people are taller than Koreans, there are principles of the relative proportions of the body. For design there should be a generic aesthetic value that all human beings like, but that's a base. And after that people will have preferences.
Do Korea's traditional Confucian hierarchies hinder good design? There are two sides to the issue. Confucianism can mean quick decisions, explosive concentration. That's good. But there are also problems. In hierarchical societies, when designers make a presentation to CEOs, the designers look at the boss's expression.
If he says, "Hmmm," the designer says, "Oh that's bad design. We'd better change it." They never challenge the bosses. So whenever I have a chance to speak with CEOs, I always tell them they shouldn't try to be experts. Don't say, "I don't like this color," but ask the designer why he chose the color.
Things are changing. In the past, product planning was done by marketing people who would choose product concepts by statistics, and engineers would present the structural requirements. The designers always lost the game. But now the head of Samsung's mobile division asks the designer to make a mockup and throws it to the engineer and says, "Make it." The opportunity has been handed over to the designers.
Are Korea's design schools teaching designers the right skills? Korea has 230 design schools -- more than America. But 80% of those schools still require a drawing examination for admission. Of course there are some design problems that require drawing. But interface design solutions can't be drawn. It doesn't make any sense.
In the '70s, drawing skills were necessary in Korea, because product planners would go around the world and collect the most advanced products. They would give them to the engineers and ask them to disassemble them, then they would ask designers to modify the look a little bit.
So at that time, a designer's problem was deciding how it should look. You needed to know how to draw. But now, companies are trying to be first in the world with innovative products. So you can't simply rely on drawing skills. A designer is not just a craftsman. He's also a thinker.
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