Defiantly plastic: designing the Galaxy S5
"Our major aims were usability, friendliness and a more humanistic design. We wanted something with a pleasing feel ... and better grip. If we used metal, [we felt] the designs felt heavy and cold," explains Senior Product Designer Dong Hun Kim, pointing to why Samsung still plays in polycarbonate. "But with plastic, the texture is warmer. We believe users will find [the device] both warmer and friendlier. This material was also the best at visually expressing volume, better at symbolizing our design concepts."
The design concept for Samsung's
Galaxy S5? Modern and flash -- and boy, that blue GS5 is certainly flashy. In the middle of a design library deep inside Samsung's "Digital City" in Suwon, Jeeyeun Wang, Samsung's principal user experience designer continues, putting it to me this way: the smartphone is no longer a cold slab of technology; "it's a fashion product now."
"We'd prefer to focus on the software improvements."
"This interview is more about the new camera interface."
We expected the designers (or the corporate comms team flanking me) to interrupt with something like the above when I asked why they persist with plastic, but they didn't. In fact, the designers barely missed a beat. Perhaps they've been itching to answer this for a while. I'd certainly been waiting to ask them. "With the GS5, we looked into all kinds of designs and materials. We were open to all options," adds Kim.
To date, the Galaxy S4 has unit sales in the millions. So did the
Galaxy Note series, and well, the rest of the top-drawer Galaxy S series
hasn't done badly either. The phones (and tablets) have become an ensemble, a symbol of Samsung's domination of Android. To a certain section of the public, smartphones are either iPhones or "a Galaxy" -- no doubt to Google's chagrin. Despite all that success, when it came to the Galaxy S5, we were promised something we hadn't seen in the last three iterations: a return to the basics. But what, exactly, would that mean in design terms?
"It's not as if one specific feature screams 'back to basics.' It's the entire experience -- you just feel it throughout," says Wang. "In the past, we've tended to put a lot of emphasis on fancy, showy features ... things that you might only use once or twice a year, but here (in the GS5), there's a new focus on core features [like the camera, the internet browser, sharing]. We made sure these worked better, worked well. That's the spirit of going back to basics."
"Can I tell you an episode?" Wang asked me. Yes! Please. Tell me
all the episodes was my eager response. "During the GS5 development, I was responsible for the software design -- how it looked. For that to work, we also needed to see the mood, the language of the hardware," Wang said. But security at Samsung, being Samsung, meant that seeing the final model was something offered only to a few designers. "At the start, we were like spies." Desperate for a peek at more finalized hardware, when the designer finally got to see the hardware, the first impression was "fun" -- but she was far more enthusiastic than it sounds when I write 'fun'.
