Federico Casalegno has been thinking about ears. Billions of ears. \u201cEars are almost like fingerprints. Every one of us has a different one,\u201d says Casalegno, executive vice president of design at Samsung.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a pertinent topic for Samsung, maker of a variety of earbuds, and for Casalegno, who\u2019s in charge of figuring out how to make those earbuds\u2014along with a deep portfolio of wearable technology products like smartwatches and smart rings\u2014as comfortable and useful as possible.<\/p>\n
Wrapping one\u2019s head around billions of ears\u2014or wrists or fingers or, indeed, entire heads\u2014is a tricky prospect, but also an increasingly important part of Samsung\u2019s business, which brought in\u00a0more than $215 million in revenue in 2025. That\u2019s why Casalegno has led Samsung\u2019s designers and product developers to fully embrace the problem-solving scale of computational design. Using the power of machine learning, digital modeling, and a deep pool of data, Casalegno is helping Samsung reinvent how it designs its products to better meet the needs of an increasingly diverse global market.<\/p>\n
Wearable Design Process<\/p>\n
This approach has increased the speed at which Samsung can evolve its wearable products. Casalegno says that not many years ago the company, like any other major product maker, was limited by conventional design tools and computer models. For something like an earbud, translating the biomorphological data of a large group of users into a design might have taken an entire month to model. Now one of those simulations can take 10 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe literally run thousands of simulations in a very short period of time, and we have millions of data points, which was inconceivable before,\u201d Casalegno says. It all adds up to faster product development timelines, and greater product diversity. \u201cComputational design, 100%, is helping to improve our product portfolio as was never possible before, but at the same time it\u2019s making new opportunities to create new products,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The Designer behind Human Centred Design<\/p>\n
As a pioneer in computational design, Casalegno brings more than 25 years of experience he honed over a long tenure at the MIT Media Lab<\/a>, and, since 2018, as one of the top designers within Samsung. On top of being a seasoned designer, he also has a PhD in sociology.<\/p>\n After taking over as head of Samsung\u2019s global design studios last November, Casalegno made computational design a central tenet of the company\u2019s product development strategy. He also sees it as a way to make products like Samsung\u2019s wearables more, well, wearable. \u201cI\u2019ve always been driven by designing for humans and bringing forward this human-centred design approach,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Even for something as seemingly simple as an earbud, wearability is a complicated goal to aim for. Casalegno says computational design has allowed his team to combine advanced computing, machine learning, and AI<\/a> to design earbuds that fit better and feature more precisely placed sensors. Furthermore, it enables them to make data-driven decisions about how designs need to be adjusted to meet the real-world demands of users.<\/p>\n Casalegno says the new product development process involves collecting a large set of 3D data on human ears\u00ad\u2014the fingerprints of the head\u2014and creating digital twins for each one. \u201cThis allows us to work with a set of data that is uniquely curated, that is precise, and this helps us to design accordingly for different demographics.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Then, using digital models of new earbud designs, the team simulates how those earbuds fit inside many differently sized ears. The designs are adjusted to make them fit better and more comfortably in as many digital ears as possible. Compared with previous development paths, when products could only be tested in the ears of a small group of test subjects, this approach enables the designers to adjust their designs to serve a much wider range of users.<\/p>\n Next, the products move into the physical realm. Casalegno says Samsung has been using 3D-printed earbuds and ear models to check the physical fit. (It\u2019s also using 3D printing to optimize the location of sensors on products like smartwatches.) They\u2019re put through rigorous testing using robots, checking to see how well an earbud stays inside an ear during movement like walking, running, and jumping. Prototype versions are also tested with real people. Data collected during this testing is then fed back into the design.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then we very quickly iterate and create a lot of design variations using AI and our tools to improve the product\u2019s performance,\u201d Casalegno says.<\/p>\n Future Wearables<\/p>\n As new products like the latest version of Samsung\u2019s Galaxy Buds<\/a> come out later this year, Casalegno says consumers will start to experience some of the influence this computational design approach is having, even if the changes are at the sub-millimeter scale. \u201cYou will feel the effect of how computational design supports our product development,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause at the end of the day, they feel more comfortable and you hear better.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/p>\n Nate Berg is a staff writer at\u00a0Fast Company, where he writes about design, architecture, urban development, and industrial design. He has written for publications including\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times<\/a>,\u00a0the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/a>,\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>,\u00a0Wired<\/a>,\u00a0The Guardian<\/a>,\u00a0Dwell<\/a>,\u00a0Wallpaper<\/a>,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federico Casalegno has been thinking about ears. Billions of ears. \u201cEars are almost like fingerprints. 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