Samsung Smartphone Concepts
Shaping New Hardware and User Interfaces.
Role: Interaction Design Director
Related Services: Future Vision Work, Interaction Design
Overview
Extensive user research shaped the development of various smartphone concepts designed to address the evolving needs of multitaskers, business users, and everyday consumers. The design explorations focused on rethinking form factors and interaction paradigms to offer more intuitive and efficient ways to manage personal and professional lives.
A smartphone concept range featuring curved displays, rotating screens, and simultaneous photo and video capture.
One key concept introduced was a dual-SIM smartphone with a rotating display. This allowed users to flip between work and personal profiles physically, maintaining a clear and seamless separation between the two. Whether responding to business emails or switching to entertainment mode, the interface adapted fluidly to each context. The Ticker concept pushed the boundaries of secondary display integration. With a near-edgeless primary screen for immersive content, the Ticker added a dynamic information strip along the phone’s edge. This subtle, supplementary display delivered real-time updates, such as notifications, headlines, or status indicators, without interrupting the user’s main activity, enabling discreet, glanceable awareness. Another experimental direction, the Spaces interface, introduced a new organizational model. Users could create “spaces” centered around projects, people, or events, each acting as a contextual hub for relevant messages, documents, and tools. Navigation was achieved using a capacitive metal touch bar—users swiped laterally to move between spaces, scrolled vertically by tilting the bar up or down, and confirmed selections with a press. This created a tactile and satisfying interface that required minimal screen interactions. The Spin concept tackled the challenge of dual identity management head-on. With a thumb-driven twist of the display, users could switch between two separate SIM cards—each with its customized environment. This gesture-based interaction provided a natural, fluid way to toggle between business and personal content, ensuring clarity without sacrificing capability.
Collectively, these prototypes reimagined the smartphone as a more adaptable, context-aware tool capable of serving the complex demands of modern life while maintaining simplicity and elegance in its operation.
The Ticker concept’s parallax app viewer provided a means of viewing the status of “live tiles” without touching the display.
The Spin concept provided for clear differentiation between personal and work content with a quick twist of the display.
These forward-looking smartphone prototypes explored context-aware interfaces—from rotating dual-SIM displays to motion-responsive secondary screens and tactile navigation—redefining how users fluidly manage personal, professional, and real-time information in a single device.
