The challenge of environmental sustainability has required product/service systems (PSSs) to play a substantial role. New technologies such as big data analytics (BDA), which have high potential to improve or enable PSSs, are increasingly implemented in industry. However, research achieved in the past and research opportunities in the intersection of PSS design and BDA are unclear in the literature. Therefore, this article took an inter-disciplinary approach and aimed to pave the way forward for research and development in PSS design and show opportunities to improve PSS design and delivery using BDA. The research methods adopted were literature synthesis and systematic literature review. The synthesis of PSS design literature resulted in a schema consisting of 10 design steps for PSS conceptual design. The systematic review of BDA literature found 11 research works, including industrial applications, which were then mapped on to the PSS design schema. This revealed the achievement of applied research using BDA for some of the PSS design steps as well as opportunities of research for the others. The two inter-related areas of research, PSS design and BDA, were connected with each other more clearly, so that further research could be anchored and motivated with more specificity.

With rising societal demands for a transition towards a circular economy and intensifying market competition, manufacturing companies are increasingly seeking alternative ways to design and develop their industrial offerings with reduced environmental impacts and increased value. A possible solution lies in designing environmentally benign product/service systems (PSSs), which often requires the redesign of existing offerings in industrial practice.This article presents a design navigator named lifecycle-oriented function deployment (LFD), which builds on the widely utilized life cycle assessment (LCA) and quality function deployment (QFD) to support the redesign of existing industrial offerings towards PSSs with reduced environmental impacts. LFD includes a novel procedure to derive environmental requirements using LCA and to prioritize them along with customer requirements. It introduces a list of generic service design characteristics to support service design. It also contains a QFD-based procedure to identify design parameters (characteristics and components for both products and services) that have a relatively strong influence on the prioritized requirements. Further, a novel way is proposed to capture specific product and service design characteristics that are feasible to integrate and potentially have a rather strong influence on the requirements when combined.LFD is subsequently applied in a case study to conceptually redesign an existing offering in a manufacturing company. The application is then assessed using an LCA and a semi-structured interview with the users of LFD. The LCA results indicate significant reductions in environmental impacts of the redesigned concepts, and the interview revealed benefits for the practitioners who used LFD.

In this article, we introduce a protocol analysis-based approach to analyze the cognitive characteristics of conceptual ecodesigning of product-service systems (PSSs). We initially present a novel and generic model to represent the lifecycle stages of solutions offered by industry and we contextualize it to PSS based offerings. Based on this representation of the PSS lifecycle stages and that of its architecture, we propose a multi-level coding scheme and a protocol analysis-based approach to analyze the distribution of designers' cognitive effort on the following three dimensions: i) different lifecycle stages, ii) different aspects of PSS architecture and iii) ecodesign activities and environmental issues. We applied this approach to analyze a conceptual PSS ecodesign case, performed in a laboratory setting by a pair of experienced practitioners. The results clearly indicate the evidence of quantitative differences in the distribution of the designers' cognitive effort on the different dimensions of PSS ecodesigning and thus, confirms the applicability and utility of the proposed approach.

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