How Samsung’s first-ever chief design officer is reinventing the electronics giant for the AI age

If Mauro Porcini’s mother had had her way, Samsung Electronics’ head designer wouldn’t have gone into design at all. “She wanted me to be a priest,” the Italian-born Porcini says, as he sits in his new office at Samsung’s R&D center, just outside Seoul’s buzzy Gangnam district, on a frigid December morning. 

Porcini did not take his mother’s advice and join the priesthood. But he does see his current job in corporate design as something like a higher calling. 

“It felt like faith...