Mauro Porcini
Design Matters with Debbie Millman
Design Matters Media
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
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Summary
Mauro Porcini is the President and Chief Design Officer at Samsung, where he leads a global design organization shaping products, experiences, and ecosystems for billions of people through a deeply human-centered approach to innovation. He joins to reflect on his journey from Italy to global design leadership and to discuss the human side of technology amid financial instability, digital toxicity, and existential anxiety.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | the entire tech world started to shift towards minimalism and this very essential design aesthetic |
| 0:09.6 | inspired by this mantra of form follow function. I'm proposing a new formula that evolves |
| 0:16.6 | from form follow function to form and function follow meaning. |
| 0:28.1 | From the Tet Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman. |
| 0:36.2 | On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, |
| 0:37.7 | how they got to be who they are, |
| 0:40.0 | and what they're thinking about and working on. |
| 0:45.7 | On this episode, a conversation with Mauro Portini about technology and design, |
| 0:48.5 | and about what a designer really does. If the technical skill is what defines you as a designer. Maybe you're not a designer. |
| 0:58.4 | Murrah Porcini has built a career at the intersection of business, design, and humanity. |
| 1:05.2 | Born in northern Italy, suspended between cultures and identities, he began his career with |
| 1:10.8 | a restless curiosity that has carried him from Phillips to 3M, then to PepsiCo, where he became the company's first ever chief design officer, and helped embed design into the DNA of a global enterprise. |
| 1:25.3 | In doing so, Morrow was recognized as one of Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40, |
| 1:30.4 | a fast company master of design, and one of the 50 most influential designers in America. |
| 1:37.0 | Today, he is president and chief design officer at Samsung, the first role of its kind at that scale, where he is advancing a bold manifesto |
| 1:47.5 | he has titled, The Human Side of Technology. At a time when technology sits at the center |
| 1:53.5 | of financial instability, digital toxicity, and existential anxiety, Mara was asking profound questions about what technology can do, |
| 2:05.0 | and he is providing some provocative and rather optimistic answers that we're all going to talk about today. |
| 2:12.4 | Moro Portini, welcome back to Design Matters. |
| 2:15.5 | Thank you for having me, Debbie. |
| 2:17.7 | Maro, let's talk a little bit about your origin story for those that might not have listened to our previous interviews. |
| 2:24.8 | You grew up in a small town outside of Milan in Italy with two passions, the world of literature and philosophy, which was influenced by your mother, and the world of art, |
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