Representation of Social Contexts for Service Interaction in Product-Service Systems.

Abstract

A Product-Service Systems (PSS) is composed of service and product element to provide values for relevant stakeholders. A typical service interaction involves providers and receivers, and respective values are provided in a social interaction. In cases, more than one providers are interacting with a receiver. In others, service interaction is happening in a public manner where social issues amang peerBRreceivers are important. When service channel is supported by physical touchpoints, receivers would interact with products, which may interact with providers. Thus, in PSS, a various kinds of interactions occur in diverse social contexts. A simple representation method for social contexts is introduced where service providers, receivers and products are represented as nodes and interaction between them are represented as directed edges. Social context of several PSS examples are described with this. In booth designing and operating PSS, social context representations could be used in analyzing and comparing key aspects of social interaction types to retrieve similar cases to exploit related interaction design strategies and operation know-hows.