Mauro Porcini

the entire tech world started to shift towards minimalism and this very essential design aesthetic inspired by this mantra of form, follow, function.

I'm proposing a new formula that evolves from form, follow, function to form and function, follow meaning.

If the technical skill is what defines you as a designer, maybe you're not a designer.

Mora Porcini has built a career at the intersection of business, design, and humanity.

Born in northern Italy, suspended between cultures and identities, he began his career with a restless curiosity that has carried him from Philips 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.

In doing so, Morrow was recognized as one of Fortune magazine's 40 under 40, a fast company master of design, and one of the 50 most influential designers in America.

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 he has titled The Human Side of Technology.

At a time when technology sits at the center of financial instability, digital toxicity and existential anxiety,

Mauro is asking profound questions about what technology can do, and he is providing some provocative and rather optimistic answers that we're all going to talk about today.

Mauro Portini, welcome back to Design Matters.

Thank you for having me, Debbie.

Mauro, let's talk a little bit about your origin story for those that might not have listened to our previous interviews.

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, architecture, and drawing, which was influenced by your father.

But you also described yourself as growing up in the middle, not fully northern, not fully southern, and suspended between identities.

Did that early experience of cultural tension shape the way you design for global audiences today?

I think is a big, big part of who I am and therefore what I do.

You call it tension because usually that's the definition when there are two opposites and you are there stuck in the middle.

But paradoxically, I always found my comfort zone in the middle of those two opposites.

And again, back then it was me growing up in the north from a family from the south.