Product-Service Systems Design Education: Normalize, Grow, and Evolve

The Future of Design Education working group on product-service systems addressed growing college-level interest in the design of product-service systems. It recognized that the existence and maturity of service design programs varies widely, as do faculty expertise and the disciplinary affiliations of programs within institutions, all of which present opportunities to expand the scale and scope of its teaching. The working group defined designers’ core contributions to the interdisciplinary practice as human-centered, systems-oriented approaches. It also acknowledged that organizational knowledge—in governance and policy, infrastructure, strategy, and operational processes—is integral to designing effective products, services, and experiences, as well as the policies, processes, and mechanisms that deliver them. Likewise, an understanding of technology and data is critical to the design of contemporary product-service systems. Framing product-service relationships as ecologies, the working group described services as being more than one-time consumer transactions with effects in larger environmental, social, and technical systems. The group clustered its curricular recommendations under three themes: 1) defining the contours of the field, 2) designing for living systems that evolve with a changing environment and opportunities, and 3) building visions of the future.