Product–service systems (PSS), motivated to fulfil customers’ needs, are seen as good strategies to face today's competitive business environment. The field of PSS research is however not fully mature and many different methodologies are proposed for the PSS design. This paper seeks to understand the directions taken in eight state-of-the-art methodologies so as to identify common needs in future research. The methodologies are studied across their authors’ views and definitions of services, PSS and their objectives and challenges, along with the tools that have been developed. A maturity model is built to access the current PSS design across 20 dimensions. The model highlights that only three dimensions are strongly treated: design processes for integrating products and services, definitions of new terminologies and considerations concerning planning and designing life-cycle phases. To enhance the industrial application, collaboration between researchers and practitioners can be spurred through two challenges: common ontology and models for representation of PSS. Particular attention must also be placed on sustainability as current models do not support the generation of sustainable PSS. As a whole, the review shows that the PSS design is still in initial stages of development and substantial research is required to develop a practical PSS design methodology.

Product success is substantially influenced by satisfaction of knowledge needs of designers, and many tools and methods have been proposed to support these needs. However, adoption of these methods in industry is minimal. This may be due to an inadequate understanding of the knowledge needs of designers in industry. This research attempts to develop a better understanding of these needs by undertaking descriptive studies in an industry. We propose a taxonomy of knowledge, and evaluate this by analyzing the questions asked by the designers involved in the study during their interactions. Using the taxonomy, we converted the questions asked into a generic form. The generic questions provide an understanding about what knowledge must be captured during design, and what its structure should be.

This research sets out a new interpretation of the patent database using affective design parameters. While this resource contains a vast quantity of technical information, its extraction and use in practical design settings is extremely challenging. Until now, all filing and subsequent landscaping or profiling of patents has been based on their technical characteristics. We set out an alternative approach that utilises crowdsourcing to first summarise patents and then applies text analysis tools to assess the summarising text in relation to three affective parameters: appearance, ease of use, and semantics. The results been used to create novel patent clusters that provide an alternative perspective on relevant technical data, and support user-centric engineering design. The workflow and tasks to effectively interface with the crowd are outlined, and the process for harvesting and processing responses using a combination of manual and computational analysis is reviewed. The process creates sets of descriptive words for each patent which differ significantly from those created using only functional requirements, and support a new paradigm for the use of big data in engineering design – one that utilises desirable affective qualities as the basis for scouring and presenting relevant functional patent information for concept generation and development.

Manufacturers aim to design product-service systems (PSS) which integrate services with products to attain sustained competitive advantage from a life cycle perspective. PSS design should be customised solutions which are aligned to integrated stakeholders' capabilities, a subject which the extant literature has not sufficiently addressed. This paper proposes a systematic framework for the PSS solution provider to address this aim and operationalizes this through software developed for PSS design which models stakeholders' individual activities and simulates their occurrences depending on their relations. The framework stresses that integrated stakeholders' capabilities define continuing ability to generate a desired operational outcome for the customers. The paper reports a PSS design case for a laser system manufacturer and then applies the framework to it. The industrial experts' views on this framework reveal that it helps to develop PSS design from a holistic systems approach which facilitates a change in the designer's mindset from a product-centric to a systems-centric. The level of trust and transparency required for this framework is argued to be absent in most industrial sectors, being one of the foremost limitations for implementation of PSS.

Many industrial processes require the nesting of 2D profiles prior to the cutting, or stamping, of components from raw sheet material. Despite decades of sustained academic effort, algorithmic solutions are still sub-optimal and produce results that can frequently be improved by manual inspection. However, the Internet offers the prospect of novel ‘human-in-the-loop’ approaches to nesting problems that uses online workers to produce packing efficiencies beyond the reach of current CAM packages. To investigate the feasibility of such an approach, this paper reports on the speed and efficiency of online workers engaged in the interactive nesting of six standard benchmark data-sets. To ensure the results accurately characterise the diverse educational and social backgrounds of the many different labour forces available online, the study has been conducted with subjects based in both Indian IT service (i.e. Rural BPOs) centres and a network of homeworkers in Northern Scotland. The results (i.e. time and packing efficiency) of the human workers are contrasted with both the baseline performance of a commercial CAM package and recent research results. The paper concludes that online workers could consistently achieve packing efficiencies roughly 4% higher than the commercial based-line established by the project. Beyond characterising the abilities of online workers to nest components, the results also make a contribution to the development of algorithmic solutions by reporting new solutions to the benchmark problems and demonstrating methods for assessing the packing strategy employed by the best workers.