Interview: Érico Fileno
Érico Fileno is strategic design director at Welab Design. He has been a pioneer in the field of interaction and service design in Brazil, serving as an evangelist and leading the way to promote the discipline as business relevant.
84
touchpoint 6-1
In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint editor Jesse Grimes speaks with Érico Fileno, a service design pioneer in Brazil, and learns about his work at Curitiba-based agency Welab, and his efforts to educate the next generation of design thinkers in his home country. With service design activities in Europe well-represented in Touchpoint, it made sense to look further afield for this issue. Can you share your observations on how established the practice is within Brazil, and what has been accomplished so far? The visibility of service design has been growing at a fast pace in Brazil and it’s currently incorporated at the top of the agenda in big companies established here, both national and international. Ten years ago, it was quite different. The year of 1999 was important for the establishment of service design in Brazil, when the Parana Design Center (now, the Brazil Design Center)
was created in Curitiba, aiming to promote a strategic design approach within Brazilian companies. I had the opportunity to be part of this team for three years, and I was involved in several projects. During this time we built an operational link with the Design Management Institute, the Design Council (UK) and some other big design consultancies in Europe and the USA, as we started to specify service design as a strategic ability. The main objective was to comprehensively learn about this new approach towards design. Another important milestone was in the early 2000s, when the Universidade Federal do Parana, in Curitiba, started
