Felipe Pontes
Brazil
CAREER Enrolled in September 2014; Completed master’s degree in September 2016
I have joined KMD with three clear goals: to change my career, experience a completely different culture, and learn how to work in an international environment. Luckily, all objectives were accomplished. Back home, in Brazil, I have worked for six years as a magazine reporter after majoring in Journalism. As time passed by, I realized that I needed a career change to keep motivated. Deep down, I wanted to become a service designer.
This was no easy task. Service design is an emerging field, and it is hard to find schools that teach it directly or indirectly. But I was lucky again to come across KMD and realizing that it could help me achieve my dream. I have studied there from 2014 to 2016, thanks to a full Japanese government scholarship. During two years, I have managed to publish a thesis related to service design, learned to become a reliable professional in my new area and how to do business in Japan.
I have eventually joined Neuromagic, a Tokyo-based consultancy and co-founded its Service Design Group. The department is still very young, but it already managed to support several large companies in Japan. My team is specialized in short, medium and long-term consulting interventions using design thinking methodologies to help clients launch better products and services. Not only that, we constantly give lectures about our field to businesses and universities. It feels good to put into practice the knowledge acquired thanks to KMD, its enthusiastic professors and excellent infrastructure.
(This article was written in March 2019.)
