“Flows: Journey to the Future”, a sculptural installation at the world-renowned Milan Design Week, celebrated Samsung’s vision of design innovation and the connection between the past, present and future expressions of their design philosophy. For their fourth annual event at the Fuori Salone, we collaborated with Cheil Worldwide to create an installation that communicated product benefits, tied them to Samsung’s heritage and pointed to the continuation of their principles into the future. The target audience, attendees at the festival, included: opinion leaders, the design community, as well as Samsung business partners (B2B). This prestige brand activation garnered invaluable PR as well as the participation, engagement and delight of festival attendees. Perhaps most importantly, it won internal fame within the wider business for the White Goods department, galvanising support and respect from other consumer electronics design divisions. Every employee at Samsung Digital City in Seoul is familiar with this project with personal visit from President & CEO, BK Yoon.

Milan Design Week is the most important seasonal opportunity for Samsung to enhance its brand thought-leadership. It is crucial to communicate the company’s commitment to design, and its expression in all Samsung products. Samsung is constantly working to stay ahead of society’s evolution so as to create products and interfaces that can compete in a fierce global CE market. The attendees of Milan Design Week are a very influential group - but they are not easily impressed. The sculpture had to attract these connoisseurs and engage them with an installation about seemingly banal white goods.

The campaign hit its objectives and then some. Our clients and partners were all extremely pleased with the attention to detail, aesthetic sensitivity and technological innovation that we applied to the installation. The exhibition marked one of the first public-facing applications of Leap Motion technology and engagement levels were high throughout the week, with an estimated 300,000 visitors to the festival each year. Thus far, it has won several awards and is in contention for many more. It has garnered top-tier press attention from Vogue, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, Elle Decor, Grazia with inclusions in “Best Of” lists for Fuori Salone 2014. The project became an excellent case study in thought-leadership throughout the vast Samsung organisation. Samsung’s design credentials and the heritage of their philosophy have been communicated in a thoughtful and effective way.

We brought to life the hidden design innovations within familiar objects - with five key home appliances deconstructed into hundreds of their smallest parts and suspended from steel cable, an animation over 20k pixels wide flowing across 24 Samsung HDTV screens, culminating in a series of stations where users could play with interactive Leap-Motion experiences.

Our exposed structure intertwined Samsung products with light, digital content and sound to represent a journey from the present into an artistic representation of the unwritten future.

Our brief stayed true to the original intention to create a site-specific installation adapted to the spatial requirements of the prestigious Zegna showroom. The installation ran for the full duration of Milan Design Week along with a curated series of promotional Samsung launches and events - from private blogger viewings, to a tour with Samsung President & VIPs, public launches with world-renown chefs & the Milan football team.