Meet the service designer: Érico Fileno

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 an academic partnership with the Köln International School of Design (KISD), making it possible for students and teachers to develop exchange programs between the two institutions. At this time, Parana Design Center was also promoting events for the public, under the banner “Design to Business”. In two different instances, the theme was Service Design; first in 2003 with Fran Samalionis (IDEO) and then in 2009 with James Samperi (Engine). At the same time, the term ‘design thinking’ was becoming more recognized within companies and design was becoming part of their agendas.

The year 2010 was very important because Professor Birgit Mager came to Brazil for an event in São Paulo, an online network was created and some short courses about service design were offered in Curitiba and São Paulo. Some new consultancies were also established, and some of the existing ones decided to better market their service design abilities to clients. In addition, big projects started to be covered in the media, as a result of the investment in service design. For example, the biggest bank in Brazil set up an innovation team and started a process to redesign all their services, and one of the biggest international insurance companies simplified their approach to communication their services using design research.

Last year, after a whole year of preparation, we established our own SDN National Chapter: Service Design Network Brazil. Following this, we’ve already held some short events that were well-attended. As a result, we noticed more and more people are looking for more information about service design, and that some new courses are being established focusing on educating the service designers of tomorrow.

With a significantly-sized economy (sixth globally, by GDP), and services compromising 67% of it, the potential for service design in Brazil seems immense. Has this translated to a wealth of opportunities for service design projects, or has the recognition of the field been more limited?

In Brazil, we are now focused on providing better services, but this is a very recent development. Services here still struggle to reach an acceptable level of quality, although the last five years have seen big companies — especially in the areas of banking, telecommunications, and insurance — developing better services for their clients. It offers a big opportunity to professionals from service design, Brazilians or foreigners, to work here. The difference between national and international companies is that the latter aren’t able to cope with cultural differences — some of them realized this and looked for local partnerships. However, there is still a lot of opportunities and a lot to be done, especially for the most experienced professionals, who know how to connect service design to business strategy and user experience (through design research and interaction design).

From your base in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, whom do you see as the other players in the market? Are practitioners largely within agencies, or client-side, or both?

I decided to establish my own consultancy in 2012 because I was missing certain professionalism at the market. As someone with a design degree, I wanted to go further than delivering a service design report; I wanted to deliver to my clients an operating service with designed and implemented touchpoints. A good example is the service we designed for the biggest Brazilian cosmetics company, in which we created an app for tablets that allows virtual experiences for make-up application. I had been working simultaneously for two years in the cities of Curitiba and São Paulo, and for this reason I was able to meet companies from my consultancy established in Curitiba. But São Paulo is the most important city for service design in Brazil, so we keep a branch office there. In this way I got to connect the historic importance of Curitiba for design to the biggest market for service design in the country. Other important agencies practicing service design are in São Paulo, as well as our main clients, but we also have clients in Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and overseas, in Colombia and in the USA.

I believe there are fewer than 20 companies working with service design in Brazil, which is a good number for an expanding market! On the other hand, companies requiring service design skills often have their own service designers (usually coming from consultancies), but their function is often to be a link between the company and consultancies. They are typically responsible for hiring professionals and managing design projects, and actually carry out little service design work within their companies. This company-consultancy partnership is the main reason for the growing market of service design in Brazil. One important thing we still miss here is the possibility to deliver a finished service to the clients, following the whole process of service design, and this is what we are performing at Welab.

The recognition of service design - and a sign of its healthy future - is shown by its presence in academia. Can you tell us more about your teaching roles at Universidade Positivo and Insper Instituto? Is service design being taught to students in Brazil, and at what levels of education?

Since 2007, alongside my design consulting work, I’ve been working as a teacher and professor for training courses, and graduate and post-graduate courses. My courses cover the themes of interaction and service design, user experience, business strategy and design thinking. I was also involved in the foundation of the first institute of interaction design in Brazil with some other professionals, and started a pioneering post-graduate course related to the theme.

In 2010, the experience gave me the chance to create a program of Human-Centered Design at Universidade Positivo in Curitiba, where we discuss the theory and the practice of design process towards the new market trends, without being restricted to the field of interaction design. Several themes, such as business strategy, service design, interaction design, user experience and ethnography are discussed over the course of three semesters. This course attracts students from several parts of the country, and we have had many successful instances of former students being hired for important positions, in Brazil and abroad.

At Insper College in São Paulo, my work as a professor is focused on the connection of design to business and engineering. At this college, one of the most important business schools in Brazil, we are discussing service design with students from business administration and economics. This year we are going to introduce the theme to students from engineering — a brand new initiative in the country — in a course totally focusing on design, in partnership with Olin College (USA). For me, being a professor is a way to get in touch with new professionals, keep studying and stay updated on the fields that interest me.

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.

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.