Abstract
The Product-Service System (PSS) concept is considered a promising type of business models that has the potential to couple social, economic and environmental sustainability. However, there are a number of organisational, cultural and regulatory barriers that hinder a wide PSS implementation. The research hypothesis of this paper is that Distributed Manufacturing (DM), described as a network of localised and customer-oriented production units, can be applied to PSS to address some of the previously mentioned barriers. In order to understand to what extent DM can improve PSS implementation, existing PSS barriers were gathered and coupled with collected potential DM opportunities. Most promising pairings were described in a set of near- future scenarios which were later integrated into the first version of the PSS+DM design tool. The first testing of the tool was carried out with 45 design students and initial findings suggest that, with further improvements, the PSS+DM design tool has the potential to support PSS solutions development process.
Keywords
sustainable product-service system; distributed manufacturing; future scenarios; design tool
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.485
Citation
Petrulaityte, A., Ceschin, F., Pei, E., and Harrison, D. (2018) A Design Tool to Apply Distributed Manufacturing Principles to Sustainable Product-Service System Development, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.485
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
A Design Tool to Apply Distributed Manufacturing Principles to Sustainable Product-Service System Development
The Product-Service System (PSS) concept is considered a promising type of business models that has the potential to couple social, economic and environmental sustainability. However, there are a number of organisational, cultural and regulatory barriers that hinder a wide PSS implementation. The research hypothesis of this paper is that Distributed Manufacturing (DM), described as a network of localised and customer-oriented production units, can be applied to PSS to address some of the previously mentioned barriers. In order to understand to what extent DM can improve PSS implementation, existing PSS barriers were gathered and coupled with collected potential DM opportunities. Most promising pairings were described in a set of near- future scenarios which were later integrated into the first version of the PSS+DM design tool. The first testing of the tool was carried out with 45 design students and initial findings suggest that, with further improvements, the PSS+DM design tool has the potential to support PSS solutions development process.