[Special Interview] Birgit Mager
Birgit Mager / President of Service Design Network
Do you have any advice or words of wisdom for Korean students aspiring to become leaders in service design?
If you would like to be a leader in service design, you should try to be a tree-shaped person. What is a tree-shaped person? You have to have deep roots and you have to have many branches. So the deep roots are the roots in design research. You need to have a good understanding on how to understand a complex system, how to visualize a complex system.
You need to be great in facilitating creative sessions and to collaborate with different interdisciplinary teams. You need to be able to build prototypes you need to create test scenarios. So it's many things and those are still the roots but the branches they need to be. It's stretched towards understanding society, understanding economy, understanding ecology and you need to have a bit of a business mind. You need to understand the organization you are working for. So a little bit about strategy or KPR OKR and you need to really understand the ecosystem within which you are working. So being a leader in service design asks for a lot of curiosity, also for passion and for courage.
But I can tell you it is super rewarding if you work with the service systems and the people within these systems and you make change for the better. So I can just encourage you to go.
