Milan Design Week: Samsung's Mauro Porcini says love is the most powerful word in design

Creative Boom: Insight Product Milan Design Week: Samsung's Mauro Porcini says love is the most powerful word in design The tech company's first-ever chief design officer thinks the design world talks too much about craft and technology and not nearly enough about what actually drives it. Written By: Tom May 23 April 2026 An exploration of the Samsung Galaxy’s foldable design across a spectrum of colour, form and experience There's a word you don't often hear at major tech exhibitions. You'll hear plenty about innovation, human-centricity, ecosystems, AI, and the future of the connected home. But love?

That's a word most corporate communicators would quietly escort out of the building. Mauro Porcini isn't your typical dry, corporate communicator. After previous stints reinventing design culture at 3M and PepsiCo, he became Samsung's first-ever chief design officer in 2025. Meeting him during Milan Design Week at the company's exhibition at Superstudio Più feels like encountering a force of nature: driven, passionate, engaged. "Design is an act of love," he begins, with the kind of certainty that suggests he's been making this argument for a very long time. "Design and innovation are the same thing.

That's what drives everything else." It'd be easy to dismiss this as the sort of warm language that gets sprayed over exhibition walls and promptly ignored. But spend any time talking to Mauro, and it becomes clear that for him, "love" isn't decoration. It's the actual operating system. From Scotch tape to Samsung The Italian designer's career to date has an unlikely internal logic. Mauro made his name at 3M, where he was credited with transforming the design of mundane office staples like Scotch tape dispensers and Post-it note holders into objects people actually wanted on their desks.

From there, he moved to PepsiCo, where he spent over a decade as chief design officer, accumulating numerous design and innovation awards along the way. In 2025, he joined Samsung, taking on the role of president and chief design officer of the Device eXperience division. Mauro Porcini At Milan Design Week In short, then, he's spent his career inside enormous companies, trying to convince them that design isn't a finishing touch. Which means he knows exactly how hard that argument can be to make. "If you just make the case for design, but you don't know how to interact with a business organisation, you won't succeed," he stresses.

"Your vision may be amazing and great for society, but it'll go nowhere: it won't create business value. Or maybe it will, but you're unable to communicate that value to the business organisation." It's a concise summary of why so many design-led visions end up gathering dust. And it leads on to Muro's broader definition of what a design leader actually does, which turns out to be considerably more complicated than designing things. "You can't be an expert in everything," he reasons. "Which means you need to be a great people leader, so that you can unlock the potential of the best of the best talents you have around you.

You also need a certain eloquence, because you need to influence. And you need to build confidence in your organisation, so the risks you need to take—and innovation is always a risk—are worth doing." No pressure, then. Why Samsung doesn't have one design language One of the more interesting things Porcini has done since arriving at Samsung is arrive at a counterintuitive answer to one of the company's long-standing internal questions: what is the one Samsung design language? His answer, essentially: there isn't one. But that's a feature, not a bug.

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Porcini's emphasis on love as a core principle in design presents a significant shift in approach that could influence brand strategies, making it impactful and relevant for professionals in the industry.