We all had known that a fresh hire was on cards in Samsung’s withering design department, and its finally here. And guess who it is ? Samsung’s new design lead is Lee Don Tae. What’s special about him is the fact that he is the co-president of Tangerine, the U.S. based design firm of which, Apple’s Senior VP for design Jony Ive was in integral part.
As reported by Korea Joongang Daily, Samsung is putting its trust on the Tangerine DNA to get out of that debacle called Galaxy S5. The sheer amount of criticism levied on Samsung for its disastrous S5 design has had a ripple effect on the Korean giant. It had to sell businesses, send in an expert team to China and more importantly, had to see declining profits for the first time since its glory days began.
Lee Don will probably bring back Samsung’s sagging smartphone business back to life, through his expertise while working Jony Ive’s Tangerine. Jony left the firm to join Apple in 1992, and then came up with those hugely popular iPhone, iPad ans iOS 7 designs.
Lee Don Tae, who has a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in London, is best known for being an integral part of the Tangerine team that redesigned British Airways’ ‘S’ shaped business-class cabins. He has also worked upon solar streetlight projects and designs of electronic car charging stations.
A Samsung official told Korea Joongang,
Lee will be in charge of leading innovation of overall and general design of Samsung products including smartphones
However, Lee’s association with Samsung goes back to 2006, when he worked as a design master to Samsung C&T. He worked on that position till 2012.
Samsung has been aggressively beefing up its dying design division. Apart from Lee Don, the Korean company also hired Tim Gudgel, a former senior Apple Retail Store designer, and Chris Bangle, who is known to be among world’s top three automobile designers.
