Cameron@Samsung
My badge and the building I worked in the background.
Hi all! My name’s Cameron, I’m currently a rising junior in the Environments track. This past summer I worked at Samsung Research America on the Think Tank Team in Mountain View, California. TTT (as it’s known for short) is an atypical R&D team charged with developing concepts and prototypes for future products and technologies; the team is composed of an extremely diverse group of people across design, engineering, and the sciences. Just to name a few, I worked alongside software engineers, mechanical engineers, optical engineers, physicists and solid-state chemistry people, electrical engineers, photographers and filmmakers, and a whole myriad of visual, motion, and interaction designers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many different types of work going on in one room as I did at TTT.
The Think Tank Team is located on the 3rd floor and has ~60 members: inside four semi-distinct labs work together: Tomorrow Lab, Interaction Studio, Pixel Lab, and Computer Vision Lab.
So what did I do, you might ask?
Well, I’m not allowed to say much besides that ‘I worked on new candidate designs and prototypes for future Samsung smartphones.’ Instead of talking about the work I’ll talk a little bit about TTT’s process and what it was like working on an R&D team inside a huge South Korea-based company.
Firstly, TTT delivers many different types of work to HQ: we make concept videos, we invent new sensing technologies, we explore novel interactions and new UX, test industrial design possibilities and create proof-of-concept hardware, create new display technologies, and more. This breadth of abilities means that some projects will have multiple components being developed simultaneously, so one group of people might be building a software prototype while another is building a hardware prototype with experimental tech. Even though the future vision (and concept video) has both of these prototypes integrated into one product at some future date, it can often make sense to incubate these pieces separately for a time.
Showing my co-worker a prototype (blurred out for confidentiality).
Before I go into a bit of culture and description of corporate scale — here’s some context, last summer I worked at an internet startup of ~200 people (all of whom worked in one office) called Asana. Working at Samsung, from a scale and culture perspective, was a totallydifferent beast. To start, Samsung Electronics employs over 300,000 people worldwide — just looking at R&D centers, ours was just one of 23 worldwide (the count increases to almost 40 if you count design centers) and this doesn’t even begin to describe the massiveness and multiplicity of teams at HQ. When Pranav, TTT’s Head, would retell the numerous visits he would make on a trip to HQ in our weekly stand-ups, it was hard to keep straight — even the concept of HQ became murky as he described traveling to different cities and campuses. All of this underscores the importance of communication and collaboration required to make TTT’s concepts and prototypes come to fruition.
‘The Dojo’ is pictured above: executives, workshops with collaborating teams from HQ, and visitors from Global TTT (our sister lab in South Korea) were hosted here during my time. It also featured a continually replenishing supply of yummy snacks.
My time at Samsung Research’s TTT was a total blast and I’m hugely grateful to everyone at CMU1 who educated and mentored me in preparation for the opportunity. I’d also like to thank everyone I worked with at TTT2 for making my time there exciting, productive, and educative in its own right.
1: In particular to Austin S. Lee, former professor of environments and interaction design
2: Especially Jeffery Pierce, Philipp Schoessler, Jason Yeh, Ranhee Chung, Link Huang, and Cathy Kim
