Samsung Gear S2 is the world's first circular display smartwatch with physical bezel interaction. It is the Think Tank Team's (TTT) earliest and one of Samsung's most important contributions so far. As the lead industrial designer of the project, I internally designed and proposed over ten design schemes during two years. Three of them had been selected and presented to the executives of Samsung headquarters, which directly influence the watch's final design.

The Second-last design scheme

For this design scheme, I came up with the idea of nesting the metal watch body into the loop structure on a single watch strip. As our casual style design orientation was different from the luxury and business design orientation of the headquarters design team, after this presentation, the executives decided to develop two versions, Gear S2 and Gear S2 Classic, unveil into the market same time.  

The Third design scheme

Although the previous design has earned recognition from headquarters, the watch's loop structure couldn't pass the reliability test without taking away the hardware space inside the watch. So I changed the watch body design and replaced the single watch strip with two customizable trips

Ring texture design

I also did a series of watch bezel's surface texture studies that indicate the rotatory function while increasing the friction of the bezel surface.   

PROTOTYPING

Besides CMF prototyping, I made the prototype for mechanical designs and explorations of the watch too. For example, I initiated using magnets to create detente for the bezel rotation. Designed a rotatory lock for the watch strip buckle and worked with a mechanical engineer to develop several prototypes of capacitive touch bezel, which used vibration of a piezo element to mimic the detente feedback.