Product-service system (PSS) design

PSS design is about integrating and designing products, services and supportive systems as combined value carrier, aligning interactions between those affecting the context and others affected by it. There are three barriers that prevent companies from upscaling towards PSS.

First, while companies may show ambition for further growth by improving current PSS offerings, thus unlocking their current PSS potential, they have insufficient knowledge to roll out current PSS. Second, manufacturers often put emphasis on innovating either products or technologies, and treat service as an add-on; they have insufficient experience in an integrated design approach to create new PSS. Third, in companies that are having trouble upscaling PSS, the root of the problem often lies in an unsupportive organisational logic, which prevents the company from successfully creating and implementing integrated PSS.

The PSS Design | Strategic Rollout Toolkit offers:

• relevant tools to enable product | service design practitioners systematically rethinking business as usual and cover gaps in PSS design processes
•   dedicated effort to integrating non-designers into a design process with an approachable and professional tone-of-voice
• a spectrum of tools and methodologies that successfully provide a 360-degree approach to a systematic design process
• deep exploration as well as for using the results of one tool to fuel another and increase impact
• the build-up and handover between different actors in the PSS system
• applicability in both international contexts and in multidisciplinary fields
• a internationally reviewed methodology and has been tested with multiple user groups
• tools selected to address the wicked problems that companies face in their daily challenges
• templates to help structure outcomes and enable its usesrs to implement them into their specific context, and overcome barriers for incorporation and implementation
  

The three stages of the PSS design process have no dominant push on product and/or service when you are working towards a solution. In other words, you cannot design with an outcome in mind.