Products as communication platforms: Investigating and foretelling the evolution of product&service systems in the digital era

Abstract

In the lifecycle of material products, from the very initial design phase of concept generation to the final disposal, information and communication have always played a prominent part that, in the digital era, is growing and is expected to grow further, also enabling the blooming of grass root and bottom-up changes in the galaxy of design-production-retail systems. Since the beginning of the human history, commerce has been playing a major role in shaping social organization systems. Retail services are not just a way to obtain goods: they provide opportunities for social relationship and cultural growth, and can be considered as a field for social innovation. Our research is aimed to investigate the systemic changes that are occurring in the realm of information and communication services in retail of material products, and their consequences on design, production and distribution processes. The research is supported by TIM-Telecom Italia, it is a wide-ranging study of social, professional and industrial phenomena enabled by digital technologies, and it involves both physical (i.e. traditional distribution in physical retail spaces) and on line services. Our goal is to outline strategic approaches to the design of innovative service/systems and, presently, we mainly focus on two key issue: - understanding and modelling the tangle of factors that determine the user experience in traditional and digital shopping processes; - develop design methodologies supporting the creation of new meaningful services so to support the customers in the understanding of value and in the search of quality in shopping processes. The paper investigates new social behaviors related to shopping, such as show-rooming and web-rooming, and we demonstrate that the pervasive use of mobile devices produces new social phenomena in retail processes and enables new opportunities to create value in retail services. From the investigation of on-line and off-line markets, it emerges the importance of social dynamics and human interactions belonging to physical world: relational dynamics and knowledge acquisition processes play a very important role in the elicitation of senses and emotions, in cultural upgrading, value understanding, quality awareness, trust building. Thereafter, a driving research questions is: how can we orient the design of innovative services so to improve the relationship between customers and retailers? The analysis of these new trends and the presentations of some design experiences bring us to the definition of some strategic directions guiding the generation of new paradigms of services in the retail field.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/IFDP.2016.3329