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An increasing number of industries are embracing sustainable business models in response to heightened competition, environmental pressures, and evolving customer expectations. One prominent business model involves integrating Product-Service Systems (PSS). Despite the potential for PSS to be regarded as a sustainable business model, there is a notable limitation of robust assessments to measure its performance. Conventional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the predominant method used for evaluation, inadequately captures the dynamic complexities inherent in PSS systems. This study proposes a dynamic PSS-LCA advancement by integrating system dynamics to assess environmental and economic performance over time. Complexity Through establishing robust functional units and simulating system behaviors, this framework addresses the limitations of traditional LCA methodologies. The framework was applied to a DSLR camera service case study, which shows that although PSS can reduce emissions compared to the traditional sales model, its success depends on managing user behavior and service quality. This study underscores the importance of dynamic assessment tools to accurately evaluate the sustainability of PSS implementation.

For recent decades, product-service system (PSS), an integration of products and services, has become a promising business mode for traditional manufacturing firms to upgrade their business instead of only selling products. However, after the 2000s, more and more attention has been paid to the upgradability of this system. It is worried that the enlarged life cycle of services could not enlarge the life of the business. Although most services and products are designed to satisfy customers for a longer time, some customers are reluctant to keep using PSS until the end of their physical life due to the changing social and technical factors. With this consideration, the concept of upgradable PSS (UPSS), a type of PSS that could predict future change and plan upgrades in advance is proposed to maintain the satisfaction of stakeholders. To date, it is found that the current UPSS is still in a conceptual stage, which lacks detailed and normative methods to ensure the identification and refinement process of requirements towards upgradable PSS are effective because of the knowledge and subjective limitations. This paper introduces an upgradable Product-Service System (PSS) design method based on time-axis design and Knowledge Acquisition in automated Specification (KAOS). This method could enable designers to anticipate future changes in stakeholders’ value propositions and refine future requirements into rational upgradable solutions for PSS. The proposed method begins by introducing the concept of time-axis-based design, providing designers with support in identifying future changes across different temporal dimensions. Based on the grasped change in future, the modified KAOS is proposed to support designers in identifying the PSS characteristics to realize stakeholders’ expectations and understandably show the structure of PSS. To verify the effectiveness, the authors have adopted a case study of primary school furniture system design. For future research, a developed solution-generation technique is expected.

In industrialised countries, the competitiveness of the products/services of the manufacturing industries in the global market is declining due to many factors, including products commoditization and rapid technological growth in developing countries. For this reason, engineering designers in industrialised countries are required to enhance their creativity in design with redefining customer value and redesigning advanced solutions. In recent years, the design thinking, which is known as a practical method for user centered creative design, is attracting attention as a practical strategy to accelerate creative innovations in engineering design. However, the logical details in designers’ cognitive process are still not clear, which hinders the practice and dissemination of design thinking. Based on above background, this paper proposes a prescriptive cognitive process model that leads highly creative engineering design. The proposed model is constructed based on the analysis of characteristics of exist engineering design process models and findings from creative thinking processes derived in cognitive science domain. The proposed model comprises following five steps: requirement finding, design solution finding, verification, validation, and documentation. The proposed model was applied to analyse a bicycle design case retrospectively, which is a past actual example that achieved highly innovative design. As a result, the application result demonstrates that the proposed model can explain the mechanism of creative engineering design process and be expected to provide knowledge basis towards creative engineering design.

A product–service system (PSS) is a concept concerning sustainability, as it offers the opportunity to decouple economic success from material consumption, thereby reducing the environmental impact of economic activities. However, researchers have identified significant barriers frequently impeding sustainability potential, which are called rebound effects. Unfortunately, the existing studies are insufficient, and there are few published studies on the actual avoidance of the rebound effect, which is a significant limitation for practical applications for decision-makers and policymakers. Therefore, this study aims to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review of the relationship between the rebound effect and PSSs, including its drivers and mitigation strategies. This study incorporates multiple perspectives to map and analyze the landscape of rebound effect research in the context of PSSs and used 152 articles from a systematic literature review covering all publication years. Using the Scopus and Web of Science database, journals, citations, authors, and keywords were identified. This study identified the annual trend of research, listed the most influential articles, and uncovered six research topic clusters related to the rebound effect and PSSs. As an innovative feature of this study, it categorised the identified drivers based on their contextual dependencies to elucidate their interrelationships. This study also presents a categorisation of mitigation strategies based on the type of approach. This study is expected to support decision-makers and practitioners in developing sustainable PSS implementation strategies.

With the increasing sophistication of systems and complexity of social problems, co-design, which diverse designers with expertise in various fields participate in design process, is becoming general design practice. In this process, Designers drive design activities to reduce uncertainty (i.e., ambiguities in design requirement) to elaborate a design solution that fulfill the requirement by sharing and adapting each knowledge. Meanwhile, where heterogeneous designers with different backgrounds, beliefs and knowledge participate, uncertainty and its reduction direction are perceived uniquely for each designer. These discrepancies in the uncertainty perception and their reduction directions are barriers to the rational elaboration of design requirement and consensus building among designers. Therefore, it is necessary to proceed with design activities under a converges the discrepancies in their uncertainty perception through sharing the contents of uncertainty and its rationale that explains why designer perceives that uncertainty. This paper develops a typology of discrepancies in uncertainty perception among designers in co-design process. This paper firstly defines uncertainty and its relationship with elaboration of design requirement under the context of co-design through literature review of extant research related to uncertainty in design. Then, we developed a typology of the discrepancies through a set-theoretic formalization of the designers' thinking. The developed typology was applied to design experiment of toilet cleaning machine for identifying the discrepancies in the design process. The all discrepancies identified during its process could be classified into the typology. This result thus demonstrated certain validity and comprehensiveness of the developed typology.

In recent years, ‘living lab (LL)’, a design approach that actively involves users as partners from the early stage of the design process, has been attracting much attention. Compared with the traditional participatory design or co-design approaches, one of the distinctive features of the LL approach is that the process of and opportunity for user participation tends to be long-term and complex. Thus, LL practitioners must appropriately plan and design effective integration of user participation into the design process to promote co-creation with users. In other words, LL practitioners are required to ‘configure user participation’ for the effective promotion of co-creation. However, to date, the knowledge on how to properly configure long-term and complex user participation in LLs has not been systematically clarified, nor have its methodologies been developed. This study develops a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs. Through a literature review and analysis on LL case studies, we identified the 11 key elements in five categories that should be considered while configuring user participation in LLs. Furthermore, on the basis of the identified elements, we developed a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs, which is called the participation blueprint. We have demonstrated its use and have also discussed its theoretical and practical contributions to the LL and co-design research community.

In industrialised countries, the competitiveness of the products/services of the manufacturing industries in the global market is declining due to many factors, including commoditisation, rapid technological growth in developing countries and a lack of creativity within manufacturing companies. For this reason, designers in industrialised countries are required to create more innovative products/services whose novelty does not depend on their own original technology alone but on flexible resource integration among diverse actors. In order to design innovative products/services, empathy must be developed among diverse actors around the premise of the design. However, the ways to understand rationalities of each other is still unclear in extant research. As a result, diverse actors with heterogeneous rationalities fail to empathise to others, and designing innovative products/services as intended is difficult. To address this issue, this study aims to develop a practical method that achieve to understand the rationality of other actor in design innovative products/services. To achieve this, a context analysis method is proposed that captures the other actor’s context in formalised procedure. The proposed method includes four steps: conducting an interview to extract information of context, modelling the context, understanding the context and carrying out the depth interview to understand a target actor’s rationality completely based on the context modelling result. The proposed method was applied to therapy robot development, which is in its early stage of innovative service design. Moreover, the application result can encourage an actor to understand the other actor’s rationality by utilising the proposed method.

The market circumstances around the manufacturing companies have changed due to several factors, including globalization, commoditization, and advanced innovation. This condition triggers the manufacturing companies to reconsider the competitive advantage of their value propositions and to promote their change not only their product but their closed business models. In regard to these circumstances, Open Business Model (OBM) is attracting attention as a new concept that replaces the closed business model which depends on the company’s own resources. OBM is a business model realized by sharing resources and collaborating with external partners. If the companies can transform their business model to OBM, they can receive several benefits such as long-term profits through providing new customer value, diversifying risks due to uncertainty in the market environment, and shortening the development period for products and services. Responding to this expectation to OBM, many researchers make a study related to this concept. However, existing research on OBM is limited to its advantages and comparison with similar concepts. Thus, it is difficult to design OBM in actual design activities. For this background, this study aims to support OBM design with high openness and proposes a design tool composed of the design templates and the procedure to use them. A proposed tool was applied to the OBM design workshop, and the application result confirmed usefulness and direction for improvement of this tool.

The Product-Service System (PSS) is regarded as an attractive business concept that could enable manufacturing industries to increase their market competitiveness. The range and intention of PSS design are rather different from those of traditional product-oriented design. Therefore, designers and design organizations of the future must possess new capabilities and competencies to create an effective PSS design. In this study, the authors developed an educational business game called ‘Edutainment for Designing Integrated Product-Service Systems (EDIPS)’ to enable users to become accustomed to the principle of PSS and change manufactures mindset. However, due to the complexity of the game system and its rules, it is difficult for inexperienced users to play this game without an expert EDIPS moderator who understands the game system and rules. Thus, the purpose of this empirical study is to disseminate and popularize EDIPS among design communities. In order to achieve this, this paper proposes a set of application tools and a guidebook as facilitation tools for encouraging EDIPS implementation and increasing awareness of the PSS principle among inexperienced users without the need for experts. The application tool automatically deals with a number of simple tasks in a game system. In addition, the guidebook substitutes individual responses to players’ questions while playing the game. The effectiveness of the proposed tool was demonstrated through application in a workshop conducted for inexperienced users of EDIPS.

As one of the differentiation strategies towards the strained global competitive market, the concept of Product-Service System (PSS) is emerging. Product-Service System (PSS) is a concept of service system, which is represented with functional deliveries from a provider to a receiver in which products and/or services are the devices for transmitting the functions. In general, actual PSSs in business are forming a complicated consortium in which various multi-stakeholders are involved. The success of product/service design relies in great measure upon the accurate understanding and satisfying of multi-stakeholder requirements, but none of the available PSS design methodologies touch upon how to incorporate and realize the multi-stakeholder requirements in PSS design. This paper intends to fill in this research gap by proposing a practical method to capture and analyze the dependency of multi-stakeholder requirements to enable the development of valuable PSS design which satisfies these requirements. The rationality of PSS design is measured using Life Cycle Costing (LCC) in order to ensure the realization of multi-stakeholder requirements persist to lay within the company’s capabilities. The proposed method was found effective in a case study application to concretize multi-stakeholder requirements in design embodiment of PSS offering. The complex requirements from multiple stakeholders were structured and reflected in the PSS design structure.

Product-Service System (PSS) is a business model that creates high added value through value co-creation process among stakeholders with sophisticated integration of products and services. In service marketing research field, value-in-context is emphasized as a way of thinking in which the value of a product or service is determined by various stakeholders following their own contexts. In order to improve the value-in-context, stakeholders need appropriate sharing of their context and feedback on its result to build consensus in value co-creation. Currently, On the other hand, the manufacturing industry makes decisions without sufficient context sharing and appropriate consensus building. In other words, information asymmetry occurs among stakeholders involved in not only the PSS but also in various sustainable developments. Against this background, this study aims to provide a method to analyze the factors that cause information asymmetry so as to realize the reliable introduction and operation of a PSS. For this purpose, this paper proposes a modelling method of context, or internal mental elements of stakeholder, to realize information asymmetry analysis from perspective of value-in-context. A design scene in business demonstrates that the proposed method visualizes the asymmetry among various PSS stakeholders. Moreover, it is validated that the proposed method is effective for derivation of solution which resolve the factor of information asymmetry.

Recently, the viewpoint of service has become widespread. In learning domains, service providers have been required to adopt the viewpoint and to provide values co-created by teachers and learners. However, production by a service provider means the generation of potential value, whereas usage by a service receiver implies the generation of real value. That is, a receiver creates value independent of the value generated by a provider. Indeed, value co-creation takes place in a joint sphere where providers and customers interact with each other. Thus, service providers must attempt to generate the potential value through service design and play a role of co-producer of the real value in the interactions between the providers and the receivers. In the current study, we developed an ontology to share the knowledge on value co-creation and the information related to the interactions between the providers and the receivers. In concrete terms, we proposed ontological descriptions of receiver states for sharing knowledge in learning service design, and conceptualized elements of consensus building and value co-creation, according to the conceptual model of value co-creation proposed in a previous study. In addition, concepts pertaining to academic emotions are also described to represent contents of consensus building. Then, we demonstrated instances of a consensus building, which is extracted from conversations during counseling by a teacher (mentor) and a learner. As a result, we obtained a metamodel for co-design processes in the learning service design, and a conceptual framework of the knowledge sharing on learning states including academic emotions by the ontological descriptions.

A method for public service design, which enables designers to realize high-value added service design by considering plural different customer groups in parallel, is proposed. In General, service designs focus on specific customers. However, because of the diversity of customer requirements, it is difficult to design a public service that addresses the requirements of all customers. To achieve higher customer satisfaction, it is imperative to summarize the requirements of various customers and design a service by considering customers belonging to different categories. In this article, we propose a method that enables highly public service development by considering groups of various customers and minimizing customer dissatisfaction by adopting a group-decision-making approach. As a consequence, improvement of effectiveness of highly public service development can be expected.

Product-Service-Systems (PSS), systems which forces on generating higher value by integrating physical products and services have been attracting much attention in manufacturing. To design PSS business model, it is important to select best business model for your company after reviewing many business model in conceptual design stage. However, our business model design workshop has revealed that it is difficult for traditional product-selling manufacturing that inventing PSS business model which includes much service element. This is because PSS business model is far from their traditional business model. Thus, it is necessary to support contriving multiple business model options on the conceptual design stage. Therefore, this study supports manufacturing to design PSS business model and proposes a task management framework for reviewing PSS business model from their product-selling business model. The proposed framework provides the designers with viewpoints and checklists for PSS business model design. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated by an application to example case.