Samsung Electronics announced today that it has created a new division of Samsung Research to help bring the company's vision of the future to fruition. The main goal of the new Experience and Insight (E&I) Lab is to work with and learn from customers, and to “explore what technologies should do rather than what they could do.”
At the current rate of adoption of smart devices, researchers believe that each person will own 15 connected devices by 2030, and each household will be equipped with roughly 40 smart devices. These new technologies will create “increasingly more sophisticated experiences,” and in many situations, these expansive smart device networks could backfire and “overwhelm users with their complexity.”
Samsung created the new Experience and Insight Lab precisely to tackle this problem and give its R&D division the means to focus on experiences first, rather than focusing on the products themselves and how powerful and/or technically impressive they can be in their own bubble.
Putting human experiences first and developing technologies around them
“We need to remember that […] products are not the experience in and of themselves; they simply help enable that experience,” said Federico Casalegno, Senior Vice President and Head of the Experience and Insight (E&I) Lab.
For example, memories can be recorded with the help of a smart device, but the smart device itself isn't a key part of said memory and/or the experience. It's merely a tool rather than the focal point of the human-centric experience. The majority of customers like cameras because they enjoy record keeping and storytelling, and not strictly because of a camera's technical capabilities.
Samsung's E&I Lab seeks to promote a new way of thinking based on the idea that customers don't acquire products or sign up to services based merely on specs and numbers. They choose certain products over others because of the experiences they can enable.
The new team believes that progress comes from the synergy between technological advances and human-centric design, and the Experience and Insight Lab wants to achieve that synergy by combining the research team's design expertise and new human-centric approach with Samsung's incredible engineering capabilities.
