This paper presents empirical results aimed at increasing the understanding of conceptual activities of Product/Service Systems (PSS) design by experienced designers from industry. Results are derived from a protocol analysis of five PSS design sessions, using the Function–Behavior–Structure coding scheme. Sessions included five pairs of professional designers and the task was to redesign a concept for an existing PSS to improve its resource efficiency. The results show (i) the distribution of design issues during PSS design sessions, (ii) on average 47% of the overall cognitive design effort spent by the designers is related to behavior, and (iii) all the design issues except requirements are constantly focused on during the entirety of the design sessions. Major differences compared to product design are the average occurrence of function for PSS design (23%) for product design (4%) and of structure for PSS design (22%) compared to the product design (35%).

The challenge of environmental sustainability has required product/service systems (PSSs) to play a substantial role. New technologies such as big data analytics (BDA), which have high potential to improve or enable PSSs, are increasingly implemented in industry. However, research achieved in the past and research opportunities in the intersection of PSS design and BDA are unclear in the literature. Therefore, this article took an inter-disciplinary approach and aimed to pave the way forward for research and development in PSS design and show opportunities to improve PSS design and delivery using BDA. The research methods adopted were literature synthesis and systematic literature review. The synthesis of PSS design literature resulted in a schema consisting of 10 design steps for PSS conceptual design. The systematic review of BDA literature found 11 research works, including industrial applications, which were then mapped on to the PSS design schema. This revealed the achievement of applied research using BDA for some of the PSS design steps as well as opportunities of research for the others. The two inter-related areas of research, PSS design and BDA, were connected with each other more clearly, so that further research could be anchored and motivated with more specificity.

With rising societal demands for a transition towards a circular economy and intensifying market competition, manufacturing companies are increasingly seeking alternative ways to design and develop their industrial offerings with reduced environmental impacts and increased value. A possible solution lies in designing environmentally benign product/service systems (PSSs), which often requires the redesign of existing offerings in industrial practice. This article presents a design navigator named lifecycle-oriented function deployment (LFD), which builds on the widely utilized life cycle assessment (LCA) and quality function deployment (QFD) to support the redesign of existing industrial offerings towards PSSs with reduced environmental impacts. LFD includes a novel procedure to derive environmental requirements using LCA and to prioritize them along with customer requirements. It introduces a list of generic service design characteristics to support service design. It also contains a QFD-based procedure to identify design parameters (characteristics and components for both products and services) that have a relatively strong influence on the prioritized requirements. Further, a novel way is proposed to capture specific product and service design characteristics that are feasible to integrate and potentially have a rather strong influence on the requirements when combined. LFD is subsequently applied in a case study to conceptually redesign an existing offering in a manufacturing company. The application is then assessed using an LCA and a semi-structured interview with the users of LFD. The LCA results indicate significant reductions in environmental impacts of the redesigned concepts, and the interview revealed benefits for the practitioners who used LFD.

This paper presents empirical evidence on which to ground the understanding of effects of a design support on Product/Service Systems (PSS) designing. The effects are measured by the extent of application of a systems perspective and level of integration of product and service elements during PSS designing. Protocol analyses of a control team and an experiment team, involving experienced practitioners performing an identical PSS design task are conducted. Only the experiment team is provided with the design support. The Function–Behavior–Structure ontology and a scheme for the systems perspective are utilized to code the data. Results show preliminary insight into the influence of a design support. The focus on systems level abstraction shows a three-fold increase, the cognitive effort spent on behavior of structure is halved and the effort on design description is more than doubled, in the experiment team.