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How Do Designers Think in Systems? – Empirical Insights from Protocol Studies of Experienced Practitioners Designing Product-Service Systems

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Design Computing and Cognition’20

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Abstract

Conceptual Product-Service System (PSS) designing is expected to be inherently different and more complex than designing its discrete product or service elements. This paper presents empirical insights from 10 protocol studies of experienced practitioners, conceptually designing a PSS in a laboratory setting. A coding scheme based on function-behavior-structure ontology was used to capture the distributions of the designers’ cognitive effort on design issues and processes. Two further coding schemes were used to capture the cognitive effort expended on different levels of a systems hierarchy and in the cognitive design spaces of PSS, product and service, as well as the interactions between them. The results derived from the analyses indicate that the practitioners expend the most cognitive effort on the design issue of behavior and on the process of evaluation. They focus most on the element level of the systems hierarchy and spend the most time in the product design space.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported in part by the Mistra REES (Resource Efficient and Effective Solutions) program funded by Mistra (The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) (grant number DIA 2014/16). The third author is supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation, Grant Nos. CMMI‐1400466, 1463873 and 1762415.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Abhijna Neramballi & Tomohiko Sakao

  2. University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, USA

    John S. Gero

Authors
  1. Abhijna Neramballi
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  2. Tomohiko Sakao
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  3. John S. Gero
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Correspondence to Abhijna Neramballi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and School of Architecture, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC, USA

    John S. Gero

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Neramballi, A., Sakao, T., Gero, J.S. (2022). How Do Designers Think in Systems? – Empirical Insights from Protocol Studies of Experienced Practitioners Designing Product-Service Systems. In: Gero, J.S. (eds) Design Computing and Cognition’20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90625-2_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90625-2_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90624-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90625-2

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