Abstract
It is critical to design for affordances, which is the messages of products and services that help human activities when properly perceived, in both product design and service design. Although research on product design for user activities or user-friendly design has been conducted, few efforts have been dedicated to product design for diverse service considerations. In the context of servitization and product-service systems, many new services are devised starting with a product. A systematic method is proposed to redesign products so that value propositions through services can be enhanced by dealing with service activities specifically. By integrating service activities and product functions, affordances for service activities are identified. Affordance features for those affordances are designed and combined into the redesign of a product to support service activities. An illustrative case of a standing wheelchair redesign is described to validate the applicability of the proposed method for product redesign for service considerations. The proposed method enhances through the redesign of products diverse life-cycle services in which many stakeholders are participating to co-create values for societal, entrepreneurial, and ecological sustainability.
Highlights
Because many new services that are newly created in product-service systems start with a product, a systematic method to redesign the product for those new services in a service provider centred approach needs to be devised by addressing the aspect of service activities and extensively
Target affordance features for service activities are devised, as noted by the second topmost step of the figure, considering the context and constraint of the product by analogical reasoning from the source affordance features selected from the repository [8]
For the affordances identified in the previous subsection, affordance features are selected from the repository as source affordance features, from which target affordances features suitable for the context of wheelchair battery charging can be devised through analogical reasoning
Summary
Most “design for X” methods provide generally accepted design rules involving product structure and material issues [13,14]; in other words, most existing design for serviceability methods are product-centred, not user-centred Services addressed in these “design for X” methods are more conventional services to ensure continued use of products such as maintenance, repair, disassembly, and reassembly. Kim developed a method to design product elements of product-service systems so that associated service activities can be and naturally induced using affordances and affordance features [25]. Because many new services that are newly created in product-service systems start with a product, a systematic method to redesign the product for those new services in a service provider centred approach needs to be devised by addressing the aspect of service activities and extensively. The paper concludes with discussions on the contribution of the paper and further research
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