30 Years of Service Design: The Artifacts and the Stories, with Birgit Mager

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Birgit Mager became the world's first professor of service design in 1995. Now retired, she has been clearing out her office and finding 30 years of artifacts along the way. In this episode, she walks Marc through them: the first German book on service design, a Siemens board game designed in an Austrian ski hut, and the Lufthansa storyboards presented on 10 September 2001. Along the way, she traces the discipline from framing to expansion to business value, digitalisation and AI, and explains why she still sees service designers as behaviour architects first.

Marc is speaking at the Service Design Global Conference in Frankfurt on 29 October, where Smaply has a booth and two workshops. Details, and 10% off any SDGC26 ticket with the code SMAPLY2026, are at https://www.smaply.com/events

Links

• Service Design Global Conference 2026, Frankfurt/Germany, 28-30 October 2026:
  https://www.servicedesignglobalconference.com/
• Service Design Network:
  https://service-design-network.org/
• Touchpoint – The Journey of Service Design:
  https://service-design-network.org/touchpoint_journal
• SDN case study library:
  https://service-design-network.org/case_studies
• This is Service Design Doing:
  https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/

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Links

• Marc's Journey Management training: https://www.thisisjourneymanagement.com/
• Marc's Journey Management software: https://www.smaply.com
• Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stickdorn
• Marc's and Gerry's short self-paced free intro course to Journey Management: https://www.thisishcd.com/courses/introduction-to-journey-management

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Credits
Produced by This is Podcasting

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