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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

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

I started a podcast a few years ago, and then life happened and it stopped. I'm back, with a new one. This is Journey Management is about the few organisations that get past the one-off project and build something that lasts. Here's who's coming, and what they're going to show you.

Many organisations say they're customer-centric. They do one service design project. Some maps, some personas, a few workshops. And then it stops.

Teams have to beg for budget for the next project. Creative spaces become museums of journey maps. Projects end up as disconnected puzzle pieces.

Only a few organisations really manage to set up an operating system for customer experience. That's the whole show.

In this trailer, I introduce the first guests and what each of them is bringing:

• Esa Nettamo, founder of JourneyOps, on the five levels of journey maturity, and why buying the tool first is the most expensive mistake you can make.
• Neil Williams, Cathay Pacific, on bringing journey management into an airline. His rule: you don't hand people a garden, you landscape it first.
• Fanny Giordano, VELUX, who is remarkably honest about getting the process wrong twice before she got it right.
• Adam StJohn Lawrence, WorkPlayExperience, on facilitation, and on the language we use when designers work with management.
• Adrienne Tan, co-founder and CEO of Brainmates in Sydney, on what happens when journeys meet product management, and why your backlog and your roadmap should be the same list.
• Birgit Mager, the world's first professor of service design, going back through the history of this field. Including the artefacts.

Practitioners and experts, showing their work. Examples and models, not slogans. No fluff, no pitch. Just honest stories about the work.

Episodes are coming soon. Follow now to be first in line.