Reflections on product/service-system (PSS) conceptualisation in a course setting

Product/service-system (PSS) approaches have over the past decade received considerable attention as possible sustainable innovation strategies. This paper presents and reflects upon the background, rationale and experiences behind a PSS design methodology applied with engineering students in a project course for the past five years. The methodology proposes four complementary dimensions of PSS: value proposition, product life cycle, activity modelling cycle and actor network, that all seem to comprehensively describe the essential conceptual design perspectives. Each of these dimensions represents an expansion of the traditional degrees of freedom for designers. It has been observed that the most promising PSS solutions seem to be those where the perspectives in all four dimensions are coherent and mutually support each other.