Development of facilitation tool for dissemination of product-service system design education

The Product-Service System (PSS) is regarded as an attractive business concept that could enable manufacturing industries to increase their market competitiveness. The range and intention of PSS design are rather different from those of traditional product-oriented design. Therefore, designers and design organizations of the future must possess new capabilities and competencies to create an effective PSS design. In this study, the authors developed an educational business game called ‘Edutainment for Designing Integrated Product-Service Systems (EDIPS)’ to enable users to become accustomed to the principle of PSS and change manufactures mindset. However, due to the complexity of the game system and its rules, it is difficult for inexperienced users to play this game without an expert EDIPS moderator who understands the game system and rules. Thus, the purpose of this empirical study is to disseminate and popularize EDIPS among design communities. In order to achieve this, this paper proposes a set of application tools and a guidebook as facilitation tools for encouraging EDIPS implementation and increasing awareness of the PSS principle among inexperienced users without the need for experts. The application tool automatically deals with a number of simple tasks in a game system. In addition, the guidebook substitutes individual responses to players’ questions while playing the game. The effectiveness of the proposed tool was demonstrated through application in a workshop conducted for inexperienced users of EDIPS.