Design Strategist - Samsung Research America (Mountain View, CA)
Overview
Samsung Research America (SRA) is Silicon Valley, CA based advanced research arm of Samsung Electronics. SRA’s mission is to research and develop market relevant technology and product concepts to help Samsung Electronics to lead innovation in consumer facing products and services. SRA plays a pivotal role in developing the next generation technology and software, user experiences, and services for future products that can enrich people’s lives. SRA’s R&D Innovation team is looking for a highly motivated individual to serve as a Creative Concept Researcher and Design Strategist. Your role is to translate SRA’s advanced research, uncover insights from social and consumer research, build relevant human stories, and create innovative concepts for products, services, and experiences.
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Duties & Responsibilities:
Actively participate in all types of creative activities to turn business, customer, and competitive insights into breakthrough new innovations.
Identify new ideas, social trends, and behaviors in North America, as well as tech and startup trends in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Know an abundance of secondary research sources (visual, trend, tech, etc.), quickly immerse in a range of topics, and translate findings into a unique point of view on where a Samsung should to go (and why).
Possess outstanding visual (image finding, designing visual information), written, and spoken communication skills to create compelling presentations that are bold, clear, and captivating.
Actively participate in a variety of creative activities to turn business, customer, trend, and competitive insights into product, service and experience innovations.
Conduct ideation for concept development, and lead brainstorms with teammates.
Build concept outlines, specific use cases, and direction for prototyping.
Confidently engage with lab heads and other stakeholders to socialize concepts, understand feasibility, and gather requirements.
Show confidence and comfort collaborating with stakeholders up to the C-level, participating and leading presentations, meetings, and collaborative sessions.
Engage with agency partners and manage the process from research to prototyping.
Manage work from end to end as an individual contributor.
Technical Qualification for the position:
3-5 years of experience in design strategy, product innovation, consumer and social research, creative storytelling, and concept building.
Clear understanding of design thinking and design management methods and principles, with a toolkit of frameworks and methods — and the ability to adapt them and invent new ones.
Must have a hardworking interest and knowledge of the latest consumer technology, preferably both in HW and in SW.
Experience in innovation and design consulting firms or similar corporate function required.
Experience in AR/VR, mixed reality, smart home, wearables or other sophisticated technology is highly desirable.
Ability to autonomously drive secondary and primary research, as well as social and consumer research.
Must have excellent presentation design and writing skills, image finding skills, and data driven storytelling capability.
Must be familiar with both critical and design thinking.
Necessary Skills / Attributes:
Minimum BS, post graduate degree in design or related fields are desirable but can be substituted with equivalent work experience.
Degrees from well-known design innovation program is a plus but not a must (e.g., CCA’s dMBA program, IIT’s Institute of Design, UC Berkeley Design Innovation, University of Toronto Rotman School, MIT Media Lab, Royal College of Art, Pratt, RISD, etc.).
Must be disciplined to self-operate and lead multiple projects in an unsupervised environment with minimum supervision.
Ability to collaborate on multiple projects at one time, thrive in ambiguity, and switch gears quickly in fast-paced environment.
Advanced level skill for MS Office (PowerPoint) and Adobe Creative Suite required.
Critical to have good interpersonal skills and passion for working with key research leaders and executives in the US as well as in Korea.
Experience working with Asian companies or companies with overseas HQ a plus.
English fluency (written and spoken) mandatory, bilingual in Korean nice to have but not required.
Ability to work in Mount View, CA required.