At first glance, designing a PSS does not look much different from designing a product. In both cases, the design teams have the same task: to create a desirable, feasible, and viable solution to the design problem. On closer inspection, however, it quickly becomes apparent that a true PSS requires much more than simply tacking a service on to a product. In response to these additional requirements, designers need to reconsider their role during development.
This starts early on, with the design itself. Product design problems are often termed‘ wicked’ problems, because both the problem and its solution are not fully understood at the start of the design project. During the design process, the problem and its solution co-evolve. The addition of a service component further complicates this co-evolvement process, as both the problem and solution space become wider, further increasing the problem’ s‘ wickedness.’ When dealing with this mutability of problem and solution, designers should actively seek opportunities within the problem and solution space by framing and reframing the design problem at hand.
Another change is that of the number of users involved. In product design, there is usually one clear end-user whose needs guide the designer’ s choices during development. In a PSS, however, many users needs are addressed. An illustration of this is the hightech romper suit developed at TU / e for premature babies in the Intensive Care Unit. It had to be designed to suit the baby, the therapist, the nurse, as well as make parents forget that their child is in hospital. As all users have different needs and wants, how they determine a solution’ s desirability also differs.
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The Designer Becomes a Design Entrepreneur Maaike Kleinsmann
To ensure the solution creates value for all users, the PSS designer should be sensitive to their different needs and deal with their possibly conflicting desires.. One way to do this is through co-creation.
Another noticeable change is that the design team is also tasked with creating a viable and feasible system. Product design is often limited to one company, where a multidisciplinary team mutually create the product. With a PSS, this has expanded to a networked effort in which team members come from different companies and institutions. That the creation of such a team is often a long and difficult process has several reasons: the mutable nature of the design problem, the undefined scope of the design project, and the often considerable differences in the interests of potential team members. The team’ s composition is also dynamic in nature, as many of the different elements of the PSS have to be designed partly in parallel and partly in sequence.
What becomes apparent when comparing a multidisciplinary team to this dynamic and networked team is the actual and figurative distance between team members. Designers in these teams have to rely on teamwork and collaboration and are aided by their visualising skills and their ability to communicate with people from other knowledge fields.
Designers creating a PSS need to take on an entrepreneurial role, actively seeking opportunities, creating value for all users, and facilitating teamwork. It is from their design skills, their ability to frame and reframe a problem, co-create with stakeholders, and visually explore issues that these entrepreneurial skills naturally follow.
Maaike Kleinsmann— 1976 m. s. kleinsmann @ tudelft. nl
. Assistant Professor at Delft
University of Technology, Product Innovation Management, Collaborative Design in Industry. Member CRISP project Smart
Textile Services
p5
climbing up the value chain
Gijs illustrates how the design of PSS includes more and different users, more companies and institutions and moves up higher in the company value chain taking up an entrepreneurial role.