Is product-service system designing different from product designing? A cognitive study of experienced product designers

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The literature suggests that product and product-service system (PSS) design problems are characteristically different. However, there is limited empirical evidence to suggest that the design cognition specific to the respective design activities is different. This article reports the findings of a comparative study of protocols of conceptual product and PSS designing carried out in a laboratory environment by 28 pairs of experienced product designers from the manufacturing industry. First, differences between product and PSS design problems were theoretically characterized in terms of their respective sources of complexity. Based on these differences, hypotheses concerning differences in the cognitive processes of conceptual product and PSS designing were developed and empirically tested. Results indicate that PSS designing by experienced product designers is more problem-focused while product designing is more solution-focused. PSS designing was found to focus more on the design issue function and the design process formulation. Further, PSS designing was more likely to apply a depth-first search strategy, while product designing was more apt to apply a breadth-first search strategy. Results point towards the need to support the analysis of derived behavior of structure and the application of a breadth-first strategy during PSS designing by product designers.