Abstract
Prototyping is one of the vital attributes of establishing a design-thinking organisation. This study suggests it also implies its oxymorons as an organisational material practice when it comes to digitalised product-service system (DPSS) development practice. DPSS development involves digital artefact design. This however requires a new organisational approach to prototyping. Designing a digital artefact is concerned with digital materiality - a combination of heterogeneous digitised materials: tangible materials (products and network systems) with intangible ones (service and contents), accomplished in a generative design approach. But it also presents new organisational challenges on increasing unknown factors emerging from the heterogeneous and generative design practices, calling for dedicated experiential learning practices through organisational prototyping. Qualitative case studies of three tech companies sharing common design philosophies found key organisational barriers to establishing a prototyping culture in association with DPSS development projects. It revealed that prototyping processes and the outcomes can be purposively manipulated for an organisation’s exploitative purposes. As an organisation’s social material practice, increasing unknown factors associated with digital artefact design engage with characterising an organisation’s concerns on the unknown. These are likely reflected in organisational prototyping. In an organisation’s design process, its conventional assumptions coupled with dominant analogies, superiors’ high power desirability and its coercive bureaucratic features reflected in prototyping processes can implicitly lead its prototyping to its exploitative purpose instead of experiential and exploratory purposes. This study presents empirical evidence that prototyping as an organisation's social material practice connotes its oxymoron.
Keywords
Prototyping culture, generative capacity, design thinking organisation, digitalised product-service system (DPSS), sociomateriality
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.108
Citation
Hwangbo, H.(2023) Oxymoron in Prototyping Digital Artifacts: Reviews of Digitalised Product-Service System (DPSS) Development Projects of Global Tech Companies, in Silvia Ferraris, Valentina Rognoli, Nithikul Nimkulrat (eds.), EKSIG 2023: From Abstractness to Concreteness – experiential knowledge and the role of prototypes in design research, 19–20 June 2023, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.108
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Oxymoron in Prototyping Digital Artifacts: Reviews of Digitalised Product-Service System (DPSS) Development Projects of Global Tech Companies
Prototyping is one of the vital attributes of establishing a design-thinking organisation. This study suggests it also implies its oxymorons as an organisational material practice when it comes to digitalised product-service system (DPSS) development practice. DPSS development involves digital artefact design. This however requires a new organisational approach to prototyping. Designing a digital artefact is concerned with digital materiality - a combination of heterogeneous digitised materials: tangible materials (products and network systems) with intangible ones (service and contents), accomplished in a generative design approach. But it also presents new organisational challenges on increasing unknown factors emerging from the heterogeneous and generative design practices, calling for dedicated experiential learning practices through organisational prototyping. Qualitative case studies of three tech companies sharing common design philosophies found key organisational barriers to establishing a prototyping culture in association with DPSS development projects. It revealed that prototyping processes and the outcomes can be purposively manipulated for an organisation’s exploitative purposes. As an organisation’s social material practice, increasing unknown factors associated with digital artefact design engage with characterising an organisation’s concerns on the unknown. These are likely reflected in organisational prototyping. In an organisation’s design process, its conventional assumptions coupled with dominant analogies, superiors’ high power desirability and its coercive bureaucratic features reflected in prototyping processes can implicitly lead its prototyping to its exploitative purpose instead of experiential and exploratory purposes. This study presents empirical evidence that prototyping as an organisation's social material practice connotes its oxymoron.