Chris Downs
Director
“I founded live|work with Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie in 2001 out of frustration that the global design industry hadn’t found a way of making a real impact on the world’s service economies.”
I’m now incredibly proud to see how far live|work and the discipline of service design have come. We’ve had great success with clients ranging from global telecommunications, to huge multinational data and financial companies such as Experian and Aviva. What has been most remarkable, however, has been the impact we’ve had on public services internationally – taking design to places it has rarely been before.
Part of our ongoing commitment is to measure the impact of our work from a triple bottom line – ensuring the financial, social and environmental sustainability of our client’s services – and my hope for the future is that this becomes common place.
As well as growing live|work (to nearly 30 people) I get to take part in many of our projects and particularly enjoy them when they make use of some of the vast data assets that many of our clients have. I believe that data is the new oil and that part of our job is to turn this untapped commodity into fantastic service propositions.
Data is quite obviously my thing – I once collected all my personal data from every company that knows me and then auctioned it off on ebay. I’m still waiting for the day when we all take control of, and begin to trade, our personal data.