Luis Alt Meet the service designer
Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this Luis Alt founded Livework in Brazil and created the first Design Thinking course in Latin America. Since 2017, he is a jury member of the Service Design Award and has co-founded SDN's Brazilian Chapter. luis.alt@liveworkstudio.com.br
edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders. Jesse Grimes: Next year will mark ten years of Livework's Brazilian studio. There are only a small handful of specialist service design agencies around the world that have been around that long. What was it like establishing service design in Brazil back then, and how have you seen the market mature in the meantime?
Luis Alt: We are delighted to have seen service design develop into an established discipline and to have contributed to its success in Brazil. When I got started, in 2009, I founded the first service design agency in Brazil, only because there were no companies hiring service designers back then. At the beginning of 2010, we were fortunate enough to have Livework founders Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie believe in the dream we had for service design in our region, and this led to us becoming Livework São Paulo. 80 Touchpoint 11-1
Considering the influence that the United States has on our country, we decided that our initial focus should be on Design Thinking instead of service design. So, in 2010, we founded a Design Thinking course at a reputable business and marketing university in São Paulo called ESPM. The following year we published the first book on the subject that was written in Portuguese, and it was filled with local project cases. We later found out that those were really pioneering activities of their kind from throughout Latin America. Deciding to explore Design Thinking as a concept and to educate the market were two of the best moves we could have ever made. Back then, it was all about this ‘new way’ of doing things, not as much the object of change (serv ices). As time passed, we began introducing to the market some concepts that are
