Inside Samsung’s design process to make your earbuds fit just right

Federico Casalegno has been thinking about ears. Billions of ears. “Ears are almost like fingerprints. Every one of us has a different one,” says Casalegno, executive vice president of design at Samsung. It’s a pertinent topic for Samsung, maker of a variety of earbuds, and for Casalegno, who’s in charge of figuring out how to make those earbuds—along with a deep portfolio of wearable technology products like smartwatches and smart rings—as comfortable and useful as possible. [Photo: Samsung] Wrapping one’s head around billions of ears—or wrists or fingers or, indeed, entire heads—is a tricky prospect, but also an increasingly important part of Samsung’s business, which brought in more than $215 million in revenue in 2025. That’s why Casalegno has led Samsung’s 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. 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. “We literally run thousands of simulations in a very short period of time, and we have millions of data points, which was inconceivable before,” Casalegno says. It all adds up to faster product development timelines, and greater product diversity. “Computational design, 100%, is helping to improve our product portfolio as was never possible before, but at the same time it’s making new opportunities