LG Electronics is launching the second season of Bold Move, a customer-participation community aimed at improving the accessibility of its home appliances. The company plans to expand participation beyond its previous focus on customers with disabilities to include seniors and non-disabled users, further strengthening its inclusive design approach.
LG Electronics said Friday it has roughly quadrupled the scale of participation in Season 2, increasing the number of participants from around 10 to about 40. Through workshops, participants share the difficulties they experience using home appliances in daily life and propose ideas for improvement. LG Electronics employees, including product planners and developers, also voluntarily take part to hear customer feedback directly. The company plans to review from multiple angles the feasibility of commercializing the ideas and incorporating them into products.
Bold Move has gone beyond simply gathering opinions to drive actual product innovation. In the earlier Season 1, more than 200 improvement ideas were submitted. A representative example came from reflecting feedback from customers with low vision, leading the company to replace the braille on the control panel of its water purifier comfort kit with intuitive icons. The comfort kit for kimchi refrigerators, "Easy Cap," set to launch next month, was also designed to allow users to take out the contents without lifting out a heavy kimchi container, and its usability will undergo intensive verification through this community.
In addition, this year the company plans to publish a Bold Move magazine themed around seniors and to actively spread its environmental, social and governance (ESG) vision of "a better life for everyone." These efforts have also been recognized in the global market, with the company recently named to the list of the "World's Top 200 Most Accessible Companies" selected by the U.S. economic magazine Forbes.
"We will actively reflect the vivid voices of customers in our products so that anyone can conveniently use our products and services," said Oh Jun-hwan, head of LG Electronics' HS CX Planning Office.
