The diversity of costumer’s needs requires manufacturers to provide a complex package of product and service. In contrast to traditional matured methods used for product design, Product/Service Systems (PSS) design still has a large room for development because of three following core research challenges: 1) development of a common shared structure to represent and understand PSS’s elements and their relations; 2) systematic modelling approaches to formulating design problems; and 3) holistic consideration of social, technological, economic and ecological elements.

This paper aims to propose a novel framework for PSS design by addressing three issues above. The proposed framework is derived step-by-step from a natural language description of PSS environment using Environment-Based Design (EBD) methodology. The proposed framework attempts to accommodate the recursive scenarios in PSS design along with PSS lifecycle. The PSS environment will be firstly analyzed through a question-asking strategy. Besides, a set of graphical tools will be presented to support the development of framework, such as product-environment system, performance network, and conflict map. A case study, concerning the service design of intellectual property protection in collaborative product development, will be presented to illustrate the proposed framework.

This content is only available via PDF.
You do not currently have access to this content.