Fortune Brainstorm Design 2025
Macau, China, December 2025
Tony Chambers in conversation with Mauro Porcini, President and Chief Design Officer of Samsung Electronics
Last month in Macau, Tony co-chaired and hosted Fortune Magazine’s global annual Brainstorm Design Conference, bringing together FORTUNE 500 executives and some of the world’s most influential designers to explore the question: how can better business results be achieved through design?
This year’s theme, ‘Future Tense: Prototyping Tomorrow’, examined how design leaders and senior executives are navigating an era of sustained disruption—developing new modes of intelligence, collaboration and innovation amidst ongoing economic, industrial and geopolitical turbulence.
A wide range of ideas came to life through a series of conversations Tony held with leading creative figures including Daisuke Hironaka, CEO of Stellar Works; Tina Norden, Partner at Conran and Partners; Martin Voelkle, Partner at BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group; and Jan Bunge, Founding Director at MULTIBALL.
TC with Daisuke Hironaka, CEO of Stellar Works and Tina Norden, Partner at Conran and Partners
One of the standout moments of the conference was Tony’s in-depth conversation with Mauro Porcini, the newly appointed President and Chief Design Officer of Samsung Electronics. During the discussion Mauro shared fresh insights into his vision for the company.
With many global organisations in an arms race to turbocharge their products and services with AI, Mauro’s big idea for Samsung poses an important question: how can AI be used to enrich and enhance human potential, rather than diminish it?
As AI continues to permeate almost every part of daily life, Mauro’s vision for Samsung is a brand philosophy that positions them as ‘the human side of technology’ amplifying humanity, by placing emotion and imagination at the centre of the South Korean tech giant’s AI-powered products.
Mauro Porcini, President and Chief Design Officer of Samsung Electronics
He expresses this philosophy through a guiding framework and equation: AI x (EI + HI ), where EI is emotional intelligence (our empathy) and HI is human imagination (our creativity), emphasising the importance of both our instinct to connect and our instinct to create.
When the conversation turned to aesthetics, Tony and Mauro reflected on the long-standing dominance of minimalism as the prevailing visual language in technology over the past 15 to 20 years.
Ripe for colourful disruption, Mauro shared his intention to introduce a greater aesthetic diversity and narrative poetry into the design and communication of Samsung’s future products and services. In a first public glimpse, he offered a sneak peek at a sizzle reel teasing Samsung's new human design language and brand direction for 2026 to Tony and the Brainstorm Design audience.
A few weeks later at CES Las Vegas, Mauro and Samsung unveiled a new series of products including TVs, speakers and smart mirrors that all embodied this new expressive and human design language — ‘a language that reflects the diversity of people: their tastes, cultures, emotions, and ways of living’.
Samsung Music Studio designed by Erwan Bouroullec, unveiled at CES 2026
Mauro reframes the rush to AI with refreshing optimism. His humanity-centred vision for AI-powered products that genuinely enrich human potential offers a compelling counterpoint to the more technological and efficiency-based narratives dominant in the sector.
His leadership as Chief Design Officer also demonstrates how branding and communications, when given the authority to shape strategy at C-suite level, can embed a sense of purpose and cultural clarity that resonates with consumers, creating a meaningful competitive advantage in the age of “AI everything”.
You can watch the full interview here.
