Product-Service Systems Design Process Based on Activities and Functions

As consumers demand diverse values reflecting their individual needs and wants from various viewpoints, including economical, ecological and experiential concerns, more comprehensive and more flexible ways to provide values to consumers are desired. Product-Service Systems (PSS) have been proposed as a solution to realize such diverse value provision. In this paper, a systematic methodology for designing PSS based on activities and functions is proposed, which is much different from the case of product design. The proposed PSS design process includes the following six steps: requirement identification and value proposition, stakeholder activity design, PSS functional modeling, function-activity mapping and PSS concept generation, PSS concept detailing and PSS concept prototyping. In the proposed PSS design process, the activities of stakeholders are defined and analyzed via service blueprint. The functions of PSS fulfilling target values are then defined and represented with the specification service providers and service receivers, and they are further decomposed into sub-functions. Then the relationship between stakeholder activities and functions are established by considering associated stakeholders, and the PSS concepts are generated by mapping product and service elements. Sample case studies are conducted to validate the proposed PSS design process.