 Hello, my name is Luiz Alt and this is the Service Design Show. I'm Marc Fontaine and this is the Service Design Show. With the Service Design Show, we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are shaping the service design field. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments and the challenges up ahead. My guest in this episode is Luiz Alt. Luiz is the founder of LiveWork in Brazil. He's a writer of a book called Design Thinking in Brazil and he's also a teacher at several universities. We'll talk about several topics in this episode. One of them includes the future of services, we'll touch up on service culture in Brazil and we'll also discuss the relationship between organizations and customers. If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide in the description or just stick around and watch the whole episode. Welcome to the show, Luiz. Thank you. Good morning for you because it's morning in Brazil, right? Yeah, it's 8 a.m. in the morning. And I'm in a grey U-Track, grey rainy U-Track, but there has to be some difference. Luiz, could you tell me, I'm really curious, what is your very first memory of service design? Alright, so it's not that long ago. I was watching some of the previous episodes and we've got some guys that are here for quite a long time. I remember it was in 2008. I was doing a master in design management in Barcelona and my objective over there was to understand how the design culture could be more instilled inside organizations and midway the course, I had a workshop with Kail Thompson from Engine, actually. He's now at Zeba in Portland and it caught a very strong impression on me because being a product designer and an industrial engineer, I thought it was the perfect way to merge both disciplines. And I started to get very interested in the topic. So I went on to investigate a little bit more about it and found out that there would be this conference, the first one in Amsterdam actually, about service design and I decided to go there and met a lot of people and my mind was set up that I should work in it and not with product design, that was what I was doing before in managing design. The conference was really a tipping point, I guess, for a lot of people in service design. A lot of people are still around that were there back in 2008. Yes, it was very good because there was a sense of community and you could see how the market was and a lot of projects were being made and I think that was kind of inspiring. So I decided to work in this area. But being in 2008, a hard time in Europe, I think that the best option at that time was to come back to Brazil and do something. So fortunately, I'm not sure if fortunately, but there was no one doing this here in Brazil, so I couldn't ask for a job and I had to come up with my own company, my own practice, so that's what I did and later on we became leave work. Are you coming back to Amsterdam for the upcoming conference? Yes, I want to. I'm not sure if it's going to be possible because we are doing plenty of projects right now, we were discussing a little bit about it before starting recording and it's in a difficult time of the year, the conference, so every year when I think about going, it's this tough decision to make, but I'm leaning towards going, yes, for sure. Alright, maybe we'll do a sequel to this episode then. Luis, we are quite a few episodes in, but I can imagine people haven't seen a previous episode yet, so let's explain the format, how it works really quickly. I have some topics printed on cards here and you have different cards printed at your place, right? So I'll pick one of the topics, you'll pick a question starter and we'll go on from there to answer that question. Alright, I'll start with the question that interests me the most because there is a reason, of course, why I asked you and the reason is I've talked to a lot of people from Europe, from the US, also from Australia already, but I haven't talked to anyone from Latin America or Brazil in this case, so I'm really curious if you can make a question that starts, it goes into this topic, service culture in Brazil. Alright, so... Okay. What is the question? How can we make the service culture better in Brazil? So maybe that's something that's been in my mind for quite a long time and I've been studying a lot, you know, being here in Brazil with a language barrier, I always wonder if I should be more... We use our time, we have to choose how we use our time, right? So I wonder a lot if I should be talking more about Brazil internationally and write and speak in English or if I should concentrate in my market and really develop a culture of design, service design, design thinking and services here in Brazil because many of Brazilians, they don't speak English. So if I write in English, I'm making a decision to talk to people from the outside. And I think it's more noble, let's say, to concentrate on getting things better here in our market and being live work at global brands, the international work is already being done, right? So... And that's why I've been... Could you start off... What do you mean with service culture? What is your idea about service culture? So, yeah, I travel a lot and when we go to Europe, for instance, the way people treat each other while in a service, let's say a restaurant or a museum or when you want to make a telecommunications plan with a contract, right? The service tends to be in a certain way and in the U.S. it's very different and if you go to Asia, it's completely different, you know? And Brazil has its own culture. So I chose this topic because I've been really digging this... digging this part, this aspect of, okay, how are we fit to serve here in Brazil? What are our qualities and what are the things that we should try to improve? What have you found so far? Because this is really interesting. I have found that we have some bad qualities and good qualities and I would like to share four of which, maybe. We have... And this is, of course, a generalization so it's hard to affirm that, okay, everybody is like this. No, that's not the case. But we see that very often here in Brazil. So, for instance, there's a project with work, you know, people think that they have to work. So it's not something... It's kind of an obligation. So it's not... People wake up in Monday morning and they are normally not happy, you know? And that's something that gets in the way, in my opinion, especially if you're going to deal with people. Also, people are task-driven, I would say, and not purpose-driven. So if you ask them to do something and they see themselves in a different situation, that they could have helped, but it's not what they've been asked for, you know? They simply don't do it. And I'm saying I'm talking about the day-to-day services. I'm not talking about those very luxury services or anything like this because we also have good services. And we have also this MWP culture, like minimum work possible. You tend to do the least possible, you know? It's kind of the sum of the previous ones if you think about it, you know? But that's something that happens a lot. People... They don't go the extra mile, you know? And that's not where you want to be in terms of providing services. But I recognize these kind of aspects in a lot of services, right? Do you feel this is more strongly in Brazil? Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm trying to decode the way we behave. And a lot of anthropologists and people that try to study those behaviors, they do that by comparison. I'm not in that phase yet. I'm just making a study on, okay, how we are as Brazilians and what kind of things that kind of manifest themselves here. So I'm still not comparing on how much different we are from the rest. But those are things that I don't like. There's also another one that's very particular here in Brazil, is that people don't perceive rules as something that are well-made, let's say. So they tend to disrespect them. And that's something that you can see a lot and we have lots of corruption cases and things that it's not ideally to talk about, but it's something that unfortunately happens. So we have to... And sometimes there's no social punishment for those kind of things. So someone does small things like getting in front of you on a line and supermarkets, you know? And the guy says, hey, you know, I did it faster. And people tend to think that this is a good thing. It's changing, but it's still there in the culture, you know? So those things, I'm not glad with those things and I would like to make them better. But we have great things as well. So that's of course also interesting. What do you think are the inherent things that the Brazilians have to actually become the best service providers in the world? Okay, so I think that we are great hosts. We can entertain people a lot. We like to welcome people in our country, you know? And we make a lot of effort to do so, you know? So it's in our nature. And well, the World Cup was a success in spite of our scores, you know? But in terms of how we received people and welcomed people, it was spectacular. And we have the Olympics coming up. And I think even though the whole structure is not the best, people tend to make things work because of how great hosts they can be. So the challenge is to actually create a structure or an environment or context where these qualities can thrive? Exactly. And there are lots of different ones. Like we are good at remixing and we know how to deal with diversity very well. And we tend to use this diversity to make new things. And that great example is Bossanova, you know? It's the mix of samba. That's our own rhythm with jazz music from the US. And this happens in a lot of different contexts. So I think we are in a good position to do great things in terms of services. Interesting. What would be the Bossanova of service design coming from Brazil? It will happen probably, right? Yeah. Well, I'm not sure what will happen with the services in the future. That's another topic that I chose. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. But there are so many things changing right now and the information that's so spread and so available right now. And this creates lots of different scenarios for services. So I'm not sure if we are going to be more localized or more globalized in terms of how the experiences will spread around the world. As you've already hinted upon this, let's just go ahead and touch upon the second topic. And this is like you hinted at the future of services. Is there a question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah. All right. So who are maybe? Who are the next great service providers? Who are the ones that will be the best ones in the service context? And that's something that I've... I chose this topic and this is a very challenging topic because I don't have great questions, great answers. I maybe have some good questions. Because everything, the startups movements, the artificial intelligence, there are lots of things happening right now that are changing drastically the way we interact with companies. So I don't know, let's say if we are going to interact with lots of companies or if we are going to interact with a specific avatar or a system. So let me ask a question a bit differently. What are the developments that are... Did you find the most exciting, the most interesting, the most inspiring? Well, I think that when we look back a couple of decades from now to this moment to this past 10 or 20 years, we'll see that a lot of things happen, you know, happened. The information that's spread and available, that's making companies, that's forcing companies to be more transparent, you know, this collaborative movement that the transparency is kind of enabling. We are seeing things that as the world grew and the population grew, we tend to be more separated from each other and kind of suspicious. And because of this, there are so many information and we can kind of trust each other because of this transparency. So we see business like Airbnb that we welcome people that we never met into our homes. We share rides with other people using UberPool or relay rides and those kind of services. So everything is changing in that sense. That's making kind of a go back to the ancient times when people used to be closer. Even though the technology, some people say that separates people. But in this sense, it's kind of making them have better relationships. That's something that's happening, but there are other things like artificial intelligence, the voice recognition and there are many other things like those screens that are everywhere. You carry a computer in your own pocket with you. So there are so many things that are happening and this kind of potential to change everything in the services and the way we know them. Do you think the service design community is ready for this? Because I haven't heard a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence and voice recognition, these topics that you just mentioned. For me, I've seen people in service design are just really busy doing good design research and making good customer journeys and getting people to act upon them. What is your experience so far? I think that design research will remain and it will still be very important because we still have to come up with solutions for the people. We design for the people, but we have new ingredients that we can use. It's all about building repertoire. It's about seeing what's around and what you can use in your favor to come up with the best possible experience. I think service designers, we tend to focus a lot on creating great experiences for people but many of those service designers that are working on customer journeys forget that it's all about the organization as well because if it's not good for the organization, then it won't exist at all. So knowing everything in those technologies and what we are able to do right now just makes things more interesting. I think we'll see, I'm really curious if we'll see different people entering the service design field people that are coming more from a technology background and feeding these ingredients in. I think everything is going to the same place. As we are seeing a movement from business consultancies and strategy consultancies and they are starting to talk more about everything that we do. I think we'll see also people from tech coming to this region as well because this is the more, I don't know what the best word is, the more humane way to come up with solutions that are good for everyone. And support is also something very important. In one of the previous episodes with Erik Roskam Abing he was telling that even his accountant was embracing the design thinking and service design way of working and that's probably hopefully where it's heading. Yeah, I think this kind of collaboration, empathy and experimentation values they should be taught at school. Because it's something that everyone can use for their own advantage to make things better, no matter what they are doing. So let's move on to the third topic that I have here in front of me and I just have the word relationships. Really curious what you'll make out of this one. Okay, so what if we thought of relationships with companies as with humans and that's something that's been interesting me a lot as well because we tend to separate both. We don't make those relations. And I was writing a new book and I was trying to come up with, it's hard to, it's not a formula, I hate formulas you know, but I was trying to come up with an understanding of how relationships work and to try to mirror them in terms of how relationships between people work and how relationships with companies. So we know the classic journey from the discovery awareness until after abandonment they return to the company. But I was trying to make a zoom out on this and I got to three different aspects. I would say that from attraction to retention. And the first one is cover. So cover like the physical aspect maybe and not only if the person is beautiful but how she's dressed and the way she moves you know and the people that is around her. That's very important. Let's say we are single, single again and we are in a party and we see someone and we tend to take a lot of conclusions just by looking at those people you know and the same thing happens in business. So I'm a tourist or let's say I move to Amsterdam and when I get there I need a mobile contract you know I need to talk to people so I'll look at the stores I'll see how they look like and from that I'll make some conclusions. It's not that I'm going to choose based on that but I will start to understand or notice which companies have a better service and are more expensive etc. So that's the first one. And then after the cover there is content so content is what the business or what the people stand for so what does this person thinks about politics and culture and does she like to see movies and go to music concerts so it's more about the values and what she stands for and maybe that's the business model in the case of a business so how much does this business charge and what does this business offer so that's the content and people tend to consider only those two things cover and content but there is also one important and maybe the most important thing that is the coexistence after we move together what happens after we move together when we start dating everything is fabulous everything works perfectly but after we wake up on the side of each other things start to get real and that's what we should take more care of in my opinion so that's coexistence. And I guess that's the part where there is a lot of criticism about service service providers that they spend a lot of time and money attracting new customers and then once you become the customer nobody cares about you and I think that's a great argument for us to use in terms of being service designers we can help a lot with that and the case for making clients stay versus gaining new clients that's already... it's common sense people already know this so we can show them the way and how we can do that how we can make the coexistence better and there is a lot of challenges in this sense because companies tend to look at current clients and what they ask for as expenses as costs and not as investments while we are investing in advertising and we should rethink this we should try to improve the relationships we have some examples that are really inspiring to you related to this topic Well, I have more bad examples than good ones I would say because it's very easy to spot horrible experiences and sometimes when we decide to sleep a little later on a Saturday morning and the company calls us to offer something that we already have from another company and they try to convince us that it's better so that's an investment on attraction and not on retention and the classic one is when you say that you want to leave and then they offer you a better deal and that happens a lot in many sectors so why is that? It also happens in human relationships I guess when you say you want to leave you get a better deal but it also happens in human relationships if the guy wants you to stay then it would be like I can make it better but why do we only stop and try to be better when people threaten to leave and why do we offer the best deals to people that are not in the best situation why can't we think of ways to be better to people that are nice to us as well so companies should try to think of ways to do that and I don't have the questions I think it's a case-based for every sector and for every company there there must be a way to do so Right, we're moving on Luis this is really a super interesting topic that I hope we learn more about so I've said in the introduction that you're also a teacher and you probably get this question a lot and when people approach you and say Luis, listen, I want to get into service design what is your most important tip for them? Well, it depends who's asking I would say because it is someone from business, I think there are three important elements when we come up with a service there is how to do it and that's more about the design thing and collaboration and empathy and how to connect to people and understand their needs and etc so if people have this already in their backpack I won't say them to do that but that's something that's very important and there's also the repertoire that I mentioned so to understand what's around and how companies are structured and how to propose things so the repertoire comes in two main aspects in my opinion so there's the technology part of it and how channels and touch points they can work together and in terms of business as well so what kind of results am I aiming for and what is possible for a business to do and what isn't and what is a good result for a business so I think there is a gap that people have to fulfill before being able to do great projects in that terms and then they can specialize themselves if you like to summarize that gap what is that gap? it depends some designers they can have a gap in business or in technology some people from computer science can have this application design and I would say that's very important and also to start doing because I see a lot of people that are taking a course and then reading a book and then researching papers and then taking another course and they don't ever feel that they are ready but you have to start doing and do a project for your uncle or for your grandfather and something like this and then you get how things work because first when I interview people one of the first things that I ask them is what's their story in terms of projects what have they done I want to know what they are capable of like Lauren Curry said in one of the previous episodes start by redesigning a service that makes you angry that's a good option Luis this is your opportunity to ask a question to the people who are listening and watching this episode Alright I think that one of since we are probably being watched by a community of service designers my question would be if they are aware of the impact that they are having on the world around us with every little decision that we make because it's very easy to think that we are no, what we are doing is very little and it's just something minor even if it's for a big company but it shouldn't be like that we are all influencing people on how to work on how to establish relationships and the outcome of our work is very noble we really get to design a better world a few people get to say that and as service designers we get to say that so I think that people should be more aware of the impact that they are having even if they are doing a very small project for their own home Alright, we'll leave it at that question are you aware of the impact that you are actually making in the world Luis, time has flown by as always in these episodes so that leaves me with one more thing and that is to thank you for your time it's nice to have a look in the Brazil culture, service culture so thanks Thank you very much for the invitation it was a pleasure and it really flew by the time, yes Oh, bye bye Bye bye, thank you So what are your thoughts about the topics I've just discussed with Luis Do you see any similarities between the relationships we have with organizations and with people? Let us know down below in the comments With the service design show we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are actually shaping the service design field If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers subscribe to the channel and check out some of the best episodes For now, thanks for watching and see you next time