for the Restt ofUs! - Reframing Studio · 10 PSS for Dummies 11 Chapter 1 Evolution of the Creative...

read it and your professional lifewill never bethe same

The fun and easy way to understand what CRISP is about!

Inject morality into your creative professional life

Gijs Ockeloen Reframing StudioExpert contributor to CRISP MagazineCASD memberProgram Committee member

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PSS for Dummies

PSS for Dummies

Gijs Ockeloen

PSS for Dummies6 7Introduction

You are no dummy. We both know that. But after four years of having participated in CRISP there is something about Service Design and PSS that makes you feel like a dummy. And that is perfectly understandable. Unlike todays generation of digital natives, you didn’t grow up in a world where every twelve-year-old managed a social network, stored a thousands albums in the cloud, or lived in a house with a thermostat that held an opinionated hourly record on ambient temperature … That’s fine! You are probably a proud, creative professional that designs REAL stuff: material goods that require top-notch design, classy ergonomics and then, after you have done your work, a keen amount of marketing and distribution.. But still — increasingly people are telling you that the world doesn’t want to buy the things that you are designing for it, that people want ‘services’ and ‘systems’ , instead. Some even say that you are a dinosaur about to go extinct!? With this book, you will no longer feel helpless when people around you act superior and speak and behave like they belong to a gang of a chosen few that understands and practice PSS Design.It will not teach you how to actually do it, but you will certainly be able to join the conversation!

About the AuthorFirst a little about the author. I was trained as an ‘old school’ Product Designer. Towards approaching graduation in the mid-1980’s I submitted a proposal for a thesis project researching the ‘user-interface of the naïve user’. I wanted to think about design as something that put human experience first, and consider that modelling as, essentially, the product offering. My proposal was rejected on the grounds that there was no ‘product’ involved. A product, according to the words of the graduation committee was ‘something that hurts when falling on your toes’. Reluctantly, I was forced to add hardware to my proposal. Now, some decades later, I know what I should have replied to that: ‘products’ hurt when they fall on toes only because it is people like you that are designing them. But that didn’t need to be the case, not even then. Technology had already been undergoing a rapid process of downsizing and disembodiment for some time: products on a nano-scale may not yet have been in consideration, but using less material, making things smaller and lighter, and making other things almost disappear, was becoming a normal state of play for design work. I should have written

Introduction an appeal: ‘You are a threat to the future of this educational institute, victims of the taste of your generation, you dislike membrane keyboards and fuel injection because you grew up with mechanical switches and carburetors. You are blind to the fact that the most exciting innovations are not happening in those industries but precisely in technologies that dematerialize’. And so on. I could have collected circumstantial evidence of the transition from a material- and manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. I could have submitted annual export figures as examples, of a scale showing that every year the sheer weight of exports was dropping, indicating vast and major changes towards intangible goods. Maybe money would have talked: I could have put the revenues of those exports on the same scale and demonstrated that with the weight of the exports dropping, the returns still increased. Of course none of that would have convinced the committee precisely because they did not share my excitement for what was coming into plain sight.If the committee had a feel for the opportunities this new frontier offered, they would have welcomed students wanting to develop holidays, health care plans and financial products next to the bulk wanting to design scuba gear, medical devices or cash dispensers. Instead, it took years to recognize that Service Design was in need of actual design input. By that time, this new offshoot of our industry was already widely being discussed in the popular press. That meant a lot of hyped-up terminology had begun inflating the discourse, and also polluting and confusing it with only remotely related phenomena, such as design thinking, interdisciplinarity, experience design, social design and co-creation. In hindsight that resulting cocktail was a kind of oversimplified parody of PSS, obscuring the main thing that mattered about it:

PSS is a cataclysmic ‘turn’ in design itself, and needs to be understood by every creative, on pain of committing professional suicide.

This book is an attempt to release the pressure, separate out the nonsense and reveal what PSS is, why it came into existence and to outline its future promises and threats to the future of our work.

REMEMBER

PSS for Dummies8 9

After reading this book you will understand:

Service Design and Product Service Systems are not new and are instead just stages in an evolutionary development that was bound to happen.

There is a world before, and after the advent of PSS.

The question is not whether creatives should embrace Service Design but rather when and how Service Design will embrace creatives.

It is increasingly inappropriate to consider any approach to design education and curricula complete complete, if it does not go beyond Product, Graphic, Interaction or any other isolated design profession.

What this book will not do:It will not instruct you ‘How to’ design for PSS: Only a real dummy expects to learn how to ‘design’ by flipping through an flimsy paperback. The next thing would be professional meltdown. Design is a difficult trade that requires talent, dedication, and passion. PSS, as with any other design work, will always entail more than following some neat illustrations and playing with some fancy props. The good thing is that to design a service or a PSS is not different from how we have been taught to design already. The challenge designers face is not on a product level, but on a system level: it is a way of looking at the ecosystem of produced, traded, and consumed goods and services. And that requires a different mindset.

Chapter 1

Evolution of the Creative Job

PSS for Dummies10 11

Chapter 1

Evolution of the Creative JobSummary: Dummies think that mixing products and services is enough to create PSS. If it would be that simple, the money spent on CRISP would be wasted: the truth is that PSS is sufficiently alien to have been unthinkable in 1990. A PSS is a socio-economic system including matter, information and infrastructure. But first things first: Do we agree about what a Product is? Or a Service? These categories will need to be re-defined in this chapter, so that we can understand how they are converging towards each other, also conceptually.

Redefining productA lot of creatives are caught up in a definition of the product that most designers still consider sensibleand clear, but muddyfies the discussion: a material thing, that they have full control in ‘making,’ the usefulness plus style of which translates into its value. This value transfers from producer to buyer at the point of sale, when the buyer sees, the use-value thatthe designer designed into it for them.

Product designers have been around for a long time. Imagine, 2.5 million years ago some pre-human hominid in the Olduvai Gorge shaped a stone into a butchering device. What a remarkable first creature that saw the point of innovating a rock into device or tool! Indeed, it was the first portable utility! The design is not ‘natural,’ but it is also not entirely unnatural that it arrived on the scene of this planet, either. It is part of the system in which it was designed, and it will contribute to change the system into which it appears. Especially once it is moved into a next user’s hands, and then a next one, in exchange for say, some food, or some shelter. This early butchering device marks a transition to a world that contained a new material category: tools of

Chapter 1: Evolution of the Creative job

pre-human culture, soon enough to be incorporating also decorative stuff, religious paraphernalia and other things we later called ‘products’. They mark a next phase of this planet after molecules and forces were organized into matter, organic as well as inorganic, and into life forms, but not yet into what we understand today as tools and products.

Product design experts, even today, still maintain that a product should hurt when falling on your toes. What is funny about that idea is that they considered someone’s pain as an essential element of a product. This is a very moral idea, and I’m actually interested in the possible relationships between design and morality, though not in that way. But we will get to that a bit later. For now, let’s first redefine the Product:

What is a product?

Anything aiming to fulfil a need, whether it is handcrafted, manufactured or harvested to be used, sold, traded or shared, qualifies as a product. Even if it would be created out of just a single molecule or even no molecules at all, as soon as it can be exchanged, it bears this name. We can skip straight through the potentially endless finicky arguments and demarcations about where materials end or where commodities begin. Magazines, works of art, credit cards, sugar or penicillin…these are products. They can be good products or bad products, depending on who is doing the judging and using. There are as many attractive products and commodities as there are trivial and even pointless ones. But both a Kalashnikov and a poem are creations of the mind and hand’s ‘design’ work, both potentially capable of changing human and non-human behavior as well as human and non-human futures.

But how do products go from material to immaterial kinds? Lets peek into the genealogical lineage, from that Olduvai butchering stone to modern day products, to isolate some of the landmark transitions that demonstrate how intangible elements have been creeping their way into material offerings.

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Value and Scarcity Our early Olduvai stone carver’s world was a kind of seller’s heaven.This first crafty hominoid, must have ruled its small world, operating in a market of great scarcity and no competition. Even with a limited amount of competitors, almost any sharp stone could be welcomed by a user. After all, an imperfect stone, which does something, is better than no stone at all. Or at least, in performing any ‘point of difference’ from what was around before it’s invention, it was socially very valuable indeed. As a result, once in possession of a stone, no one would want to cancel the deal or complain about imperfections. In that scene, there were always plenty of others anxiously waiting to take the disputed product in the absence of much else on offer.

In this state, the device consists of nothing but matter. It indeed hurts when you drop it in your toes. But this kind of early commodity is also the last moment in which ‘matter’ is the only thing that matters. Watch how intangible elements creep in with every new step from here.

Competitors enter: Buyer’s economySuccess always creates competitors. At some point in time, maybe at the birth of the iron age, there were enough spearhead crafters to have saturated the market for butchering devices. Self-respecting hunters from that era were offered a choice.

Given so many buyers and more and more sellers, the producer had to make sure the product that was being produced and offered to the market was satisfying their buyer the most. Otherwise, there was a risk of having to solve a consumer quarrel with an armed hunter-gatherer prone to easy aggravation. This situation was to the advantage of the buyer, more than the seller, since the producer somehow had to guarantee the user’s satisfaction.


Satisfaction GuaranteedOnce a cycle of innovation based on competition sets in, smarter and more confident producers understand that they must continue to innovate beyond use-value to take into account buyer perceptions of ‘quality’. Producers started to organize themselves into guilds, offering products with warranties against defects, guarantees, reimbursement options, maybe stone-carved certificates proving that their product is the real thing. These things protected buyers from defects, malpractices or disappointment, even though ‘quality’ in itself is an intangible thing.

Product responsibilityWhat happens when some careless user ends up with a nasty cut from using a knife with questionable ergonomics? Of course there would have been cuts from the beginning. But in a scene of great competition, quality assurance starts to become a part of the product’s value, and people begin to really blame the manufacturer for broken promises and a lack of responsibility taken for things that happen beyond the moment of the sale. Consumer organizations began here, when consumers started to amass power that could be used to negotiate consumer rights. Think of the right to be protected from health hazards and the duty of producers to protect the user from danger.

Up to this point, producers emphasize the sale of as many units as possible. In the process, raw material gets moved from natural resources and the earth’s lithosphere, and sold to producers. As long as raw material is abundant, it is not profitable to re-circulate these units. On top of that, while our planet’s resources are reduced, waste gets


left in the environment at the end point of production, while the relationship between the producer and the community, including the environment, exists purely on ‘monetary’ terms.Fast forward a few million years, and many of these issues of production, consumption and waste management remain. At a certain point, emancipated and increasingly vocal consumers have begun to understand there is a problem in being surrounded by waste and depleted mining sites. One of the great design emancipators must have been Victor Papanek, whose concerns about the human and ecological impact of design work were registering already in 1971 in ‘Design for the Real World’. We know that the Club of Rome confirmed his concerns in 1972. Slowly, the consumer took an interest in the producer being responsible for their product beyond the consumer’s own self-interest too. As one example, what is the producer’s responsibility for all those ancient hunter/ warriors that just dumped their first stone carving tool in the middle of the road when metal ones became available. Who is going to clear the rocks from the road? Or regulate where the tools get dumped? Off course archeologists and historians love dumpsites and maybe some will be excited to learn something from our deposits of giant vortexes of garbage millions of years from now. But will they be around to reconstruct the tale? We are talking about the role of design in threats to survival itself, not just confronting the challenges of a single profession. The market doesn’t really take care of this, does it? Since the birth of the industrial capitalist age, from Adam Smith’s time and onwards, it is a prevailing myth that ‘the market’ accomplishes its own self-regulation. In reality, industry takes only the responsibility it wants to take. First come the profits of production, accumulating while we are all the while clearing much of the worlds valuable material bio heritage, such as our oxygen-producing rainforests, and destroying the atmosphere through the combustible energy requirements of supposedly ‘efficient’ business innovations. The market would have destroyed all that much sooner if governments hadn’t imposed certain kinds of legislation against this.

Responsible products: labelling

The Club of Rome published their Limits to Growth treatise in 1972; it has taken more than four decades since for governments and the general population to spring into awareness and action. If we can call things like Kyoto action. All the while, ‘Rome’ was being ridiculed as a bunch of fatalist doom preachers.


But lets say that somewhere in the first decade of the new millennium we reached the point where governmental bodies got serious. Producers began to differentiate themselves through labelling themselves as ‘more responsible’ and on the side of good or at least ‘better’ production: green, eco, recycled. These moulded ‘new’ opportunities for sales, charging the consumer for this ethical difference as well. Once the producer and the consumer are demanded to connect to the actual changing conditions of the planet, there are other flow-on effects. For one thing, the user and producer relate less like a one-night stand, and more in the terms of an interdependent marriage.

Teach the userAs products and technologies become increasingly complex, people can have a hard time understanding, maintaining or operating the innovations. Unless they are given great instruction, users do not easily buy into complex products. Design at this point crosses over with education and service. For something like iWelding equipment, based on a new technology requiring less energy input, the producer might sell the product with a course, schooling the buyer to deal with the equipment. Probably the schooling never ends. With each product advance, come perhaps annual advanced courses.

Finance PlansWhile some products become more and more expensive, others becomes cheaper and cheaper. In the first case, fewer and fewer people can afford them while in the case of cheaper products, industry needs more and more buyers to consume the mass scale of outputs. In both cases consumers need to be supported in parting with their money. Credit plans are developed to enable both groups to keep consuming.

First sale objectCompetitors enter:Buyer´s economy

Producers organizing into guilds Product responsibility

Responsible products:Labelling Teach the user Finance plans


There are many more trends that can be added — of immaterial benefits of products changing the game — societal gains in sophistication, in civilization, but also in self-awareness of faults and in respect for the limits to growth. I could develop this timeline into a whole elaborate thesis. But for now, this super sketchy and rough ‘introduction’ to how a product economy has evolved into a complex servicized-product economy by incorporating socio-economic innovations, is basically clear in getting the idea across that products that contain nothing but matter will be hard to find at least in industrialized societies.

Redefining ServicesServices have been around for a very long time, perhaps longer than that first carved stone. We can only guess what these pre-human creatures have been doing all day long without any tool or device around, but things that may come to mind include collecting food stuffs, guarding possessions, taking care of one’s parasites such as flees and lice, or even administrating disagreements and fights among each other.

What is a service?

There are many definitions of a service. We often talk about the quality of ‘customer service’ in buyer assistance and support. This particular usage frequently occurs in retailing. This book proposes more broadly that any human- or machine-executed activity performed and traded for the benefit of others should be regarded as a service. While money is often involved, it is actually irrelevant whether services are performed on a commercial or a supposedly altruistic basis to be defined as such. In the end, all of them are socio-economic transactions, whether producers are able to demand direct financial compensation for them or not.

Activities become a service as soon as they are traded for the experiential benefit of others. And although there remain some services that don’t involve any object at all, there are infinitely more services one may provide once they are attached to products.

Productizing servicesThe availability of products and their incorporation in services must have been a big driver for the emergence and proliferation of Services

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as such. A ‘De-licing startup’ in that Olduvai gorge provided around the campfire may have begun using nothing but bare hands. But as soon as the knives form our first designer became available, the company may have expanded its repertoire in providing brutal hair cuts from these rudimentary tools. Slowly, hair cuts become more impressive as more sophisticated tools became available: blower dryers, dying equipment, crimping, curling.

At some point, certain hair cutters gained a reputation that could be exploited. They found the power to make the customers come back to them, above everyone else, by the time the hairdo was grown out. Tricks included providing customers with free shampoo samples, or gifting free products like combs with the hair innovator’s address imprinted. So far nothing fancy, just productization.

The ‘product-service continuum’In so many of our talks and writing, describing product and service designers ‘coming together’ in PSS, we set up ‘a service’ as something that is the opposite of a product. What apparently distinguishes a product from a service in our minds, is the fact that a buyer is usually assumed to own a material good after they have bought a product, whereas when they pay for a service, they more often get an experience that is more ephemeral, involving limited to no actual material resources. You can have ‘exclusive’ services, where a buyer maybe owns singular access to some experience or resource. Contrarily, the notion of ‘public services’ involves access to things that are collectively paid for by taxes or donations, and where a social contract is assumed to exist between the service’s use and its value.


We creatives can be a bit of a stuck up bunch, acting still like we are the first stone carver on the block. We like to say that our key ambition is to make good ‘products’, because that distinguishes us from anonymous workers and machines who churn out mere ‘commodities’, which is the name given to non-differentiated raw materials or goods on the market. We didn’t pay attention to ‘services’ because ‘services’ used to be what underpaid people who ‘didn’t make anything’ provided to the market, without leaving significant authored traces. We got that idea from old-fashioned economists, which would separate designers as a special kind of ‘productive’ worker, producing ‘things’, from service economy workers who were considered, materially speaking, ‘non-productive’ in producing more ephemeral experiences. In the old-school model, when we called a product a product, we said that we have given it our unique attention and put work into its difference from other commodities, in ways that other workers don’t. We valued how, and why we made it for its users, and we wanted users to value our work, and decision-making in the same way, for how it can be used. My graduation committee’s old fashioned (but still very much alive) definition of a product as being ‘something that can drop on your foot’ was clearly a very limited definition of a product. It reduced the product to something material and finite in measure, whether artisanal or mass made, good quality or shoddy. The possibilities of design didn’t include ‘design’ in how a user might experience a design’s performance in the world — regardless of whether ‘the thing’ could drop on my toe or not.In other words, the concept of the product as a material good ignores the increasing dematerialisation of production, economy and culture. There are many designed things that can be sold to us and that perform so well, without having any material weight (at least to the user’s own minds and hands) whatsoever. Servicization, productization and dematerialization processes have been going on for centuries, driven by innovations in products, materials as well as social innovations. But they were not a topic of prolific academic introspection until this century. So it is not surprising that my committee refused my thesis. Maybe if they would have glanced over at how marketing people were being educated at that time, they might have seen that a product can be anything offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need, whether ‘the promise of better hair’ or ‘a more sustainable investment plan’. In the language of the present-day risk management industry, an insurance policy is considered a product, offered for sale inside of an elaborate contract. What should matter to the creatives involved is what the participating buyer is experiencing and valuing, in and by what is on offer. Here, designers become Service Designers. Maybe it is still possible for creatives to refuse to deal with these servicized aspects, and ostentatiously remain a product designer only, but that is like refusing to deal with ergonomics, or any other aspect that has become an inseparable part of a product offering. These creatives will become suppliers and will no longer be in a positon to ‘move or shake’ any significant parts of industy.


What is a product service package?

IBM is a great example. The M in their name reminds us that they started out as a computer manufacturer, but at some point hardware production became a shrinking part of their ‘business solutions,’ which they outsourced to China before getting rid of it completely. They pioneered increased focus on subscription pricing models and other ongoing relationships with users. Rather than receiving a one-shot payment for a boxed, manufactured and assembled amount of matter, money transfers to IBM through perennially rolling revenue from ongoing, long-term contracts.

xerox

This expanded definition of ‘service’ clearly brings the traditional definition of the product much closer to, or into the mix with it. Apparently services and products may have started out at as opposites, but gradually found themselves somewhere on a continuum of products and services, converging towards each other as whole economies undergo servicization and productization processes. The increasing blurriness between the old dichotomy of product and service has been replaced by what you could call a ‘product – service continuum’. Products are being transformed into services. Services are considered ‘stand alone’ products or commodities and often include material artefacts in their offerings. The reason these continuum offerings never received a lot of attention from creatives may have been that the products inside these offerings seemed unaffected.

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Dominos pioneering packages

Consider the Domino’s revolution in service systems used to produce and sell delivery pizzas. Many companies still work the old model: you call up the pizza company, make your order, and get a pizza at your door in about half an hour. Domino’s pioneered industrial engineering and food science to automate a lot of what was involved in making pizza, eliminating much of the repetition and manual labour, producing more ‘reliably’ uniform products. It also reduced paperwork and introduced systems to automatise ordering, but also marketing, HR, accounting, stock, and other control functions, through computer delivery and tracking systems.While these links between customer, payment systems and accounting were sped up, you still got the pizza you always ordered, and the experience of the pizza for the most part remained the same, albeit less ‘handcrafted’ and more standardized. Changes to ownership,organisation, technologies and other social changes effected mainly the link between user and store manager, and delivery time. Not the pizza. We say that Dominos accomplished the ‘servicizing’ of the pizza, a product service improvement. It is debatable whether this is a true PSS.

Defining PSS - Socio Economic Reorganisation

While there are similarities, there are clear differences between product service packages and PSS. To introduce a separate category for the latter is to address the social implications for the re-design of the product-service relation itself. A leased copying machine does not have deeply transformative cultural or sociologic implications compared to one that is sold to an owner. Leased cars and copying machines are not designed so differently than the owned versions. Contrarily, the difference between the pre-PSS world and the PSS-impacted world of design will be something more like before and after Gutenberg. This claim requires further explanation.

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What makes a PSS a PSS?The last time I had my hair cut at my fancy salon, I was offered to take home an iTrim: a neat hi-tech gizmo, programmed on the spot by my hairdresser while he was shaping my hair style and refining my beard. Tiny blades in the iTrim allow me to neat up my beard, sideburns and even back of my head myself in a daily routine combing process. It basically gets at all the bits that become shabby the fastest. Sensors in the iTrim monitor the length of my cut but also the dryness of my skin, releasing moisturising natural oils when necessary, while the display accumulates information on each use of my iTrim, and inform my hairdresser of my daily maintenance regime. I will need to go visit him in his salon occasionally for a major upgrade to my style and beard shape, but the iTrim’s promise is that I can extend the interval between visits drastically. When the time comes,the iTrim itself makes an automated appointment with my salon’s agenda. By the time I am in the salon chair, I’ve also sent through ideas in advance for my new cut, using the PreMirror function of the iTrimmer, to cut down time spent explaining what I want (and to save any confusion). Maybe newer versions of the iTrim keeps a track of current trends among other iTrim users, and even sounds an alarm when the style you are currently walking around withgoes out of fashion... Clearly here, we are not dealing with solitary products that function on their own, away from the world of combs and scissors, mirrors and barbers interacting with their customers. The iTrim is part of a system involving many elements: Haircutter, Home-Grooming, Pre-Mirror functionalities, Communication, Information storage, Social interaction. None of these design facets should be designed independently, and the components hardly function meaningfully on their own. What is essential is this: Hair Culture will soon change drastically.

iTrim

ALERT!Hipster Yuccie

REMEMBER


What is PSS?

A PSS is a system in which matter, information and social and/or environmental interactions interplay in one single coherent value offering. Material products, intangible services and systems infrastructures, but also the relation between these elements, are all part of a PSS.

PSS is NOT just something new to learn or sell. It is not the shift from goods to services but a re-entanglement of both, ultimately resulting in interconnected and communicating systems in which the relationship between producers, consumers and other stakeholders are completely redeveloped.

PSS is nothing less than a way of approaching the future of creative industries itself.REMEMBER

WARNING

Chapter 2

Birth of PSS and its Path to Maturity


chapter 2

Birth of PSS and its Path to Maturity

What a funny idea. How can an idea have two moments of inception? I argue that PSS does. At first, somewhere in the sixties, it became a social and technological idea for transforming society. This idea came up at the point where critical thinkers realised that mass product development, consumption and waste massively challenge the ecological limits of production. But the idea didn’t become mainstream then, and was effectively framed as doomsday, hippy agitprop.In a second instance however, as late as the 90´s, PSS becomes an everyday business proposition for innovation, when portable, wireless and personal computing becomes a reality for a large number of the world’s consumers. There are clear connections and disconnections between these two ‘moments’ of the PSS concept. And now that PSS has become a reality, where do we take it form here?

Conceiving PSS - The Double Moment

The first ecological moment of PSS A product-service-system is a new term for a fairly old idea: emphasizing access over ownership, it basically and very simply prioritises the value of more efficiently and socially shared resources and products among groups, and recognizes that innovative systems that do this, being just as important as innovative products. This was especially a part of the thinking of people like Viktor Papanek, associated with the late 60s era of socially and ecologically responsible design culture.

Chapter 2: Birth of PSS and its Path to Maturity

While that radical culture and its idea of responsible PSS has receded, we can still say we have been involved in a whole number of PSS systems for some time. Today’s user friendly and fully networked public libraries are not considered an obvious example of PSS innovation, but they are quite a formidable example of it, having disrupted the way library goods and services were experienced by users before their arrival. Paradoxically, it seems that we tend to think of something as a possible PSS ‘innovation’ only for products or services that have not (yet) been considered viable (or culturally appropriate) to share before ‘now,’ or where it has not yet seemed feasible to attend to its environmental impacts.

As we innovate for an at-risk planet, however, we cannot beat around the bush. We have to ask ourselves if there are any real limits to PSS at all. There will be as many cultural as systemic or structural barriers that make PSS a difficult ‘interruption’ for some products or industries that are trying to offer different ways of being in the world and doing business. But the bottom line for designers is that if people continue to associate wellbeing, affluence, achievement and belonging with wasteful ‘personal’ ideas of individual ownership then this ‘limitation,’ too, is basically a design challenge. Especially where alternatives are very clearly more affordable, smarter, more sustainable, and so on, it is the work of design that must convince us experientially that we should be doing it already.

The second informational moment of PSSWhat was needed to make PSS attractive to industry, such that we have been talking about it in CRISP for the last four years? Ecological responsibility was apparently not a sexy carrot dangling in front of investors’ noses: Eco advocate Mark Goedkoop* et al. has been publishing very insightfull papers on PSS since 1999. These have not seriously impacted CRSIP.

The second moment, the innovation that most flattered industry awareness of PSS and its potential was the transformation of space into the datasphere*. The catalytic product was arguably the Nokia Communicator in 1996, the first portable wireless phone that doubled as a computing device. From then on, the Internet was mobile. At first the rate of usership was small, and the idea perceived as gimmicky by late adopters. Today however, the iPhone, invented only in 2007 is ubiquitous. The iPhone was the first to use a browser, which greatly sped up the penetration into everyday life with networked data. Information was flowing through the air 24/7, waiting to be plucked out of the datasphere anywhere at anytime by smartphones


and other devices. Any product equipped with wireless communication technology could compute networked data for many different purposes once these data conditions and infrastructures were set. Devices such as the iTrim mark a transition away from solitary objects and link them to an ever growing body of ordered and connected ‘things’ flowing through wireless networked environments. While proto-PSS systems like leased copying machines may have preceded shared datasphere, only networked datasphere enables true real-time production and accumulation, and marginal costings, via information flows that will eventually revolutionize all human interactions. What is new, even radical, and only true for PSS, is that new technology makes it possible to redesign the conditions of end use — the user experience — and to compute the efficacy or assess the variations in consumptions patterns of that end experience. And all of this in accelerated, real-time dynamics, across larger and larger data sets formerly uncomputable by merely human brains.

This, my fellow creatives, is why I emphasise PSS’s two moments of inception. It did not take off after the 60s, and was mainly perpetuated by a band of eco-oriented creatives. The mainstream industry more or less ignored the first ecological moment of PSS. Essentially though, we need to bring the first and the second moment of PSS together.

Dematerialization and PSS - three reasons to fight for PSS

During the last three decades, the US economy doubled in dollar terms. In the same timespan, Americans jointly consumed 45 million tons less in material goods. And while they were doing that, 55 million new Americans were added and joined the consumption fest.So apparently, the US managed to grow economically while producing fewer material exports. Despite significant and complex realities like this, the concept of DEMATERILIZATION has been more or less absent in the CRISP discourse. This is an omission because the concept provides us with three arguments for why PSS matters.


Dematerilization - An Ecopolitical analysis: Debunking the neo-con mythIn post-Fordist production modes, production may include the design and trade of social things, experiences, ideas, services, concepts. Increasingly, money will be made from selling genuinely immaterial goods. But what does that mean in reality? After some small successes of ecological movements in the 90’s, we were sold a very simple idea that we could actually dematerialize the entire economy. Scary ‘limits to growth’ could be bypassed supposedly; we no longer had to worry about limits of resources or energy because we weren’t using any. Radicals started advocating a withdrawal of regulative bodies, and with that, responsibility itself got outsourced.Listen to Ronald Bailey of the neoconservative thinktank Reason suggest that:

’As long as market-driven technological progress is allowed to proceed, taxing and hectoring people into increased material poverty is not necessary to protect the natural world,’ [furthermore] ‘…as polls show, people won’t put up with it anyway’.

With statements like that circulating since the late 70´s, we have to revisit this notion of ‘dematerialization’ and what it really means. How could it be true that the economy gets ‘lighter’ or uses fewer and fewer materials? In Bailey’s terms, that seems a very convenient idea indeed.

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The answer depends on how dematerialization is defined. A manufacturing company will simply take some of its products from the production line, measure them and confirm that there was less matter going into their material production. Transportation companies might check their scales and note that their containers are becoming lighter and lighter. Nano-tech companies will indicate that they need microscopes to check the achievements of their latest innovation. App builders will show their latest Apps virtualising all sorts of physical devices including a compass, a pitchfork, an egg timer, etc. But I, the consumer, just descended into my basement to be confronted with no less than six obsolete smartphones, two audio sets, a defunct microwave, two Wifi routers, two TV Setup boxes. All of these trashed good contain either a mains outlet or batteries, meaning they are dependent on energy that does not show up on the scales of the transporter, nor on the callipers of the nano-tech guys, nor on the spring ruler of the manufacturer. The App builder has never given any attention to how much actual energy Apps use. To me, as a consumer, as well as a designer, dematerialization has turned out more like a long-running and convenient lie. Competing notions of the concept demonstrate the different interests of those concerned with what consumption and production are doing to our expiring planet. Those who see themselves as catering for the needs and interest of their consumers may not see themselves as catering to the consumer’s actual environment and future. In theory, dematerialization should be beneficial to both of them because the use of less material is obviously cheaper in production, storage and transport, resulting in smaller quantities of waste in all phases of the product life-cycle. But the cheaper thing to do is obviously to continue doing what we have been doing: burn coal, clear the Amazon, consume any animal that can be caught, and mass produce endless gimmicky innovations that only sound like they are revolutionary, but aren’t. ‘Less is more,’ is attributed to Mies van der Rohe (but did you know, first used by 19th-century poet Browning?). Mies never cared much for the environment and not surprisingly, he and the entire modernist architecture movement became the darling of real estate developers aiming at commodifying architecture into exchangeable assets. But ‘Less is more’ may be literally true if you take an environmental point of view: the next generation products are smaller and lighter than their predecessors. Some of us are too aware that some miniaturized things are not necessarily better! Tiny music players are inferior in sound to Garrard 301/401 record players; nothing beats a carbureted ‘58 HONDA C90 engine. Maybe to say so is to cling to a bygone context that no longer exists, but we know new smaller generation products can very often mean inferior products: reduced life time, non-repairability, lower specifications, degrading materials. If that is the case, even more products will have to


be produced, resulting in a greater amount of raw materials and waste in both production and consumption. ‘Less is more’ is thus also a statement about dematerialized products being cheaper. Is there such as thing as a First Law of Consumer-Economics: As prices fall, consumers will respond with consuming other products using the saved money. All economic policies are devised to stimulate this consumption with or without the support of industry. It is the engine that runs our society and therefor the basis of our economic system. For this reason, all sustainability programs that even question consumption growth will be ridiculed.

If creatives don’t take a stand here, we will be commoditized ourselves. Reduction in Consumption can, but also should be a prerequisite of PSS!

Dematerialization – a Thermodynamic RealityIndustry may be embracing dematerialisation for opportunistic reasons, but debating with them may be a waste of time: dematerialization would have happened anyway. Dematerilisation is an autonomous process that had been directing evolution even before human beings came into existence. You may be forgiven for not being aware of this. Indeed, you were probably educated to believe that dematerialising technologies are solely an invention of human brains. This chapter wants to rid you of that idea:

Technology is an evolutionary step in the development of matter itself, and was bound to happen. Yes, that is right! Dematerialisation is a process that has been trending since before human existence. You might be put off by the following explanation of this claim, but if you skip it just remember that you best believe that our objects will increasingly undergo processes of dematerialization:

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A Thermo Dynamic Analysis

You could begin the story of dematerialization with the Big Bang. Although as designers maybe we can remain dummies on the exact processes. From what I remember my physics teacher in high school taught me, is that in the first brief period after the big bang, for just a couple of seconds, as the universe expanded, there was nothing tangible, just plasma and just one force: electro magnetic radiation. Everyone who has opened a camping gas canister knows that expansion causes a drop in temperature. That is exactly what the plasma - and radiation - filled universe did. But the expansion was going faster than the cooling down to keep up, resulting in variations in temperature unevenly distributed across the universe. Variations result in differences in potential. And those potential differences are the drivers of all our processes. We all should be thankful for this ongoing expansion, because without potential differences, we would be headed for absolute immobility. Or, maximum entropy. You and I would not exist in a state of maximized entropy. Instead, the existence of potential differences set a chain of events in motion beginning with gasses further cooling down and starting to coagulate into material chunks. New forces emerged: nuclear forces. Photons morphed into mass particles and unevenly distributed clumps crystalized… once there was matter, there was also gravity, and once there was gravity, there was a way to shape space, to form gaseous clouds, to create rocks, stars, planets and galaxies. At that point, matter became the new protagonist in the universe, displacing energy as the dominating phenomenon.At first, the molecule kingdom was simple. Just some inorganic molecules such water and hydrogen, as well as organic ones like methane and ammonia. But simple components can make intricate constructs: methane and ammonia are conducive to the formation of complex organic matter such as amino acids, nucleotides, RNA and DNA. Once there is organic matter you will end up with life, minds, thought, science, culture and also technology.

Someday I may ask Robbert Dijkgraaf to review the above. But what is essential to take from this, is that with each step in the evolution, the amount of information increases: apart from energy and matter our corner of the universe now also features Information. Information is created when matter is ordered into structures. You can tell by looking at the deep structure of yourself: check out those bio-organic structures neatly laid out in your chromosomes. You may find the exact same molecules in isolation elsewhere in nature. But the ones that are organized in your double DNA helix can store information.

Just as matter is dethroned energy, currently Information is rapidly on its way to becoming the dominating process on this planet — dethroning


matter. Information is challenging matter in this way, and will reduce the relevance of matter.

The increase of information on our planet competes with the thermodynamic realities heading for a maximization of Entropy. As long as it lasts, an increase of info-structure, as opposed to infrastructure is a triumph over entropy. That is the thermo dynamic explanation of why, at least on our planet, matter is on its way out, its economical future is doomed, and so, why resistance to or denial of PSS is futile.

Dematerilization - An Informational EvolutionAlready we see a lot of our fellow human-beings regarding matter as a vehicle of the immaterial. Dematerialization brings our understanding of the past into dialogue with planetary futures in more ways than one. When the ‘Gaia’ philosopher James Lovelock was asked to come up with a detector to demonstrate the presence of life on Mars, he proposed to design a system that could detect a reduction of entropy ‘since this must be a general characteristic of life’. Should you have skipped the previous thermo dynamic analysis, you will have to take it from Lovelock, and me: If there is anything that qualifies as ‘the essence of life’ you will not find it in matter. Not in man made artefacts. But also not in Brains or in DNA:

Instead, you will have to consider information streaming and stored in structured systems, thus reducing entropy.

This means that products will undergo continuous processes of dematerialization while, at the same time, interconnectivity, order and streaming of information will increase. Servicization is increasing InformationNow we know how we should have looked at the evolutionary steps we outlined in the genealogical lineage starting at that first tool. Instead of creating a timeline of inventions, we should have investigated how the increase of order and structure resulted in an increase of information, and how that increase prepared ground for further increasing the potentiality of storing information.

The increase of structure in the evolution of technology is obviously similar to the evolution of life . At some point, PSS too will come to be considered ‘ alive ’.

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PSS for Dummies32

Entire libraries are filed with attempts at solving the debate about what separates and distinguishes technology and life. Many of these debates are essentially religious quarrels. We can simply observe that at some point in the near future, PSSs will be able to develop by themselves: PSS will auto-generate appropriate new modules, troubleshoot their own operations and remedy problems, take care of their own energy management, defend themselves, replicate themselves. All of these already happen in separate cases: Software viruses can spread and hide themselves, copiers that get stuck can reboot on a previous system version. Someday pretty soon, all of this behavior will happen within a single system, that system will follow the same urge you and I share: to keep itself innovating without waiting for someone’s consent or input and for no other reason that it refuses to die. My iPhone transmits a geotag along with each picture that it takes. It adds order. It is not alive because it will die if I don’t recharge it. If I discard it, it will oxidize and eventually fall apart and return to the initial, high entropic state of all of its components: soot, ash, iron as well as some noble elements. But how long will it take before that iPhone will be looking for opportunities to charge, to protect itself against degradation? It is irrelevant that it took human minds to create iPhones. What is important is the evolution of technology was bound to bring us PSS just as evolution brought about eyes, sexual reproduction and wings.

It is a myth that these happened by chance and a misconception that they are the endpoint. They are opportunities for the next step, and that is how we should value PSS.

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Chapter 3

From Mass Culture to PSS Culture


chapter 3

From Mass Culture to PSS Culture

In PSS, social and cultural responsibility becomes a factor in design, not least because of the ‘ karma ’ (why not call it that) enabled by data transparency. PSS will affect our culture, or, in the words of Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, ‘ that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. ’ In this context, beyond aesthetic, economic and ergonomic questions, creatives should recalibrate around the cultural consequences of the transition leading to services inhabiting the datasphere.

Design’s contribution to the world’s potential for social, informational and ecological regeneration

We all know mass production had a massive cultural impact. Mass culture has been a topic of research, debate and controversy since the turn of last century. In the early days, most critics argued that mass culture (reduced to radio and TV productions, paperback novels, department store furniture) was debased high culture (painting, symphonies, litterature). Moral debates as to whether cultural shifts towards mass production or PSS are ‘a good thing’ don’t make enough sense. For users, but also designers, without much control over the economy or technology, its like talking about the weather — it will occur autonomously, and develop and unfold whether we like it or not. Unlike the weather, though, right now and especially as designers we do have some control over how PSS will evolve.

Chapter 3: From Mass Culture to PSS Culture

Resistant critics fear that data privacy will be compromised and that customers will be ‘locked-in’ to monopolized PSS relationships. But there are ‘perverse’ opportunities that can lurk inside any service contract, old or new. Similarly, whether proprietary ‘lock-in’ happens as dystopians imagine, or whether privacy is sabotaged by new systems of information collection, is up to the designers of PSS to manage. It is in this sense that an increasingly ‘mass’ culture of PSS and shared ownership — which sounds a bit oxymoronic, but will happen — will force the larger economy and meaning of culture to change, just as previous versions of ‘elite’ culture were affected by so-called invasions from mass cultures of the past. Today, we are all educated to value owning significant numbers of goods, and to crave for the next new thing. But PSS will also educate us differently to this, in our uptake of it. Now that ownership and mass production are on the line, we must prepare for shockwaves through our culture.

Shockwaves have downsides. We should be aware of them. As we proceed into PSS culture there will be major adaptation issues, like employment; entire industries will be wiped out. People will loose their jobs and maybe even their purpose in life. There are concerns that PSS might result in a dystopian, unconscionable contract: opaque, gated, and a threat to our privacy. We will remember that the printing press plunged Europe into a century of war and civil unrest. Likewise, PSS will lead to a multitude of problems in so far as we will have to reinvent all our classic institutions: money, ownership, taxes, citizenship, mobility, and justice.

This is the call to arms then: A sophisticated society has a moral obligation to ensure a ‘soft landing’ and reimburse transition costs incurred.


Obsolete industries will have to be bought out, people unable to make the leap will have to be re-educated, and provided with certain securities. Apart from this being the moral thing to do, attention to ‘soft landing’ will reduce economic and social costs, in so far as we do not desperately oppose things that cannot be opposed.

Morality as a design questionIn the current production and sales system, it seems that even if you take a moral standpoint as a designer or user, you have limited power to enforce it. As a product designer, you are simply a too small part of the entire process to claim much bargaining power. But in the PSS economy, this is no longer quite true, because if you design something that works efficiently and modifies the socio-economic system around it, you have succeeded in making an impact that has an ethic and a value to it. Welcome to the driver’s seat! PSS holds ethical design promises inside of the informational and societal realities in which it has become possible. Consider the conventional idea of a commodity-based transaction: the seller and buyer generally don’t have the same amount of information on the offer that is being made. The seller might offer a lower price to cover up the fact that the thing will soon be outmoded by an upgraded version of the same product, which the buyer does not know about yet. The buyer thinks a bargain is being offered, not knowing the product is about to become (first, socially) obsolete. This ‘information asymmetry’ is more or less accepted in business, but actually the concept is interrupted by PSS, in so far as reputation and ongoing user relations are a system element. Without a good reputation among users (think of the revolution in low budget accommodation caused by AirBnB) you will face a hard time finding people that want to deal with you. While regular hotels knew nothing of their guests and guests knew only how many stars the hotel dared to post on their façades, price policies were opaque, facilities were little known until you opened the door to stay, and the quality of room service depended more on the person that was on duty than on any organised service feedback system. That sort of business model will soon be killed by the PSS impact of Air b’n’b. Other all too well known examples of pre-PSS business model casualties include the clunky and time wasting personal photograph development, the modern Taxi industry, the film exhibition model, music distribution and production and so on. A lot of consumers say they don’t care about the ethics of the products they consume. So do a lot of designers, still. Their arguments usually are that if they say no to something morally dubious, the next person will step up to the innovation anyway, and make money from it without their participation.

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But what if we thought differently: PSS turns this around by saying that with increased moral responsibility for design, precisely at the level of service and system design, it is going to be increasingly profitable to try and do the good thing. Because not only can you try and close the loops of materials used (why not do that?), but also your reputation will build on the scale of your social and systemic ambitions. People are not inherently amoral; they just fall away from moral responsibility because in certain commodity design systems it was easier to do that.

If ‘PSS for Dummies’ succeeds to engrain a moral obligation into the minds of the creative community, thereby making life on this expiring planet a little better, this book will be a success.’

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Conclusion


Conclusion - So what is the big deal?

The transition to a PSS economy has already started. We are still in that early quiet phase just before the storm. Even so, a lot of focus has been given to negative impacts. Prophets of doom, such as Andrew Keen, foresee societal turmoil. While it is true that a lot of organizations may not be able to respond to the shift, this means that we need to more concertedly invest our best thinking and innovation into the positive opportunities PSS will bring along.

Opportunities for producers and entrepreneurs First come the opportunities for producers and entrepreneurs. PSS implies higher value offerings that are much more easily differentiated and harder to copy. PSS provides adequate entrepreneurial answers to low-cost competitors. That’s right: you no longer have any excuse to Hit-and-Run, Rip-off or Copycat! Instead PSS requires intimate, and long-lasting relations with customers, and delivers exactly that.

PSS enables business models that generate continuous revenue streams.

Opportunities for prodcution PSS may also be the end of some of the adverse effects of mass production. For instance, mass production finds it hard to cater for niche markets since the only way of reducing the price of goods is to steer niche customers into the same generic mass products.

In a PSS, these ‘long tails’ are easily served, as mass customization will replace mass production.

Opportunities for consumersMost of the above will be beneficial to users too. In addition, users will be released from the responsibilities of asset ownership, including things like maintenance, managing risk reduction, taxation, insurance, providing consumables and the troubles that come with disposing of products. Users will also enjoy intimate customization enabled by accurate and rich feedback on actual use, and more versatile production methods.

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Chapter 4: Conclusion

In a PSS, users will spend less, enjoy more benefits and face smaller risks.

Entrepeneurial opportunities for consumers But wait: what is this ‘old skool’ rhetoric, separating producers from users still? Yes, PSS is challenging this classic boundary by enabling an osmotic exchange of responsibilities and power. You can see this happening at Amazon, where you can sell back the books you want to get rid off, and at AirBnB that allows you to find a neat place but also to rent your own place.

In a PSS, producers and users morph into prosumers.

The biggest winner will be society at largePSS favors a more sustainable approach to business and production. In a PSS economy, sustainability and circularity become a reality as well as a direct interest for all stakeholders.In a ‘closed loop’ production economy of PSS, inspired especially by the ecological ‘60s’ moment of PSS, the material elements remain a responsibility of the system provider. This party has a direct interest in proper maintenance and responsible use, since after product life is over, all components come back to the company doorstep. Moreover, the producers want it to come back, because they are taking new responsibility for paying (economically and ecologically) for matter - including through dematerialization. PSS’ best thing: for the first time we seem to have a model in which economic development can coexist with a decrease in environmental pressure.

This has been a promise with earlier models and programs of worldly design, but those earlier models never transparently included both production and consumption. Consider a PSS production advance such as for instance improving mileage. PSS counters the offset because of opportunistic consumption effects with three answers: 1)Dematerialisation, combined with 2) a Circular economy, and 3) Accurate data on actual use, that may be used to stimulate responsible and fair re-use. PSS has a built in potentials, that it will develop into directions that are in sync with satisfying user, producer and societal needs.

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Wrapping up PSS benefits:

Benefits producerCreating more Value for customers

Escaping being a commodity provider

Creating true innovations

Decreasing investments

Accurate and real time data on actual use

Intimate customer relations

Discouraging competition

Benefits Customer Custom offers

Decreasing costs

Less hassle from asset ownership Benefits SocietyDecreasing environmental load

Buzzwords

*Buzzwords

…join the conversation by learning and responding to some of the PSS lingo:

Accelerated Evolution: As Information replaces matter, everything is speeding up. As a result dynamic effects that used to take decades to become apparent, unfold in front of your eyes. eyes as in a time lapsed video. Now is the time to get your motor running for maintaining speed actually means falling behind. Co-Creation: A much-perverted idea that is based on the assumption that just because it has become easy to reach people and have them contribute, their input is relevant. Maybe it is for redesigning the next pepper dispenser or toilet brush, but hopeless when the future context is altered in a significant way. In designing projects such as unmanned mobility, new voting systems, urban garbage collection you don’t need to interview of consult any ‘user’ simply because these users don’t exist. Converging Industries: Formerly distinct industries closing in on each other and at some point morphing into one. Usually, one of them is an old school prey to a digital predator. Cradle-to-Cradle: This is McDonalding sustainability. They sold a fantasy that has become popular either because most people are not familiar with the first two laws of thermodynamics or because they are neo-conservatives. No one, not even Mr Braungart will be able to recycle energy no matter how many corporations buy into their franchise scheme. CRISP: Creative Industries Scientific Program. In case you missed that.

Dematerialization: No need to deny that this is happening. But be aware that it is also an abused concept used in heralding the beginning of a new era in which we no longer have to worry about natural resources. Therefor never consider dematerialization without also checking out how much energy is required to produce, operate and discard your creations. For instance: your completely dematerialized better self, your virtual avatar on Second Life off surely does not consume as not use as much energy as your physical self? The answer is no, but only if you are from the first world and even then ‘you are in the same ballpark’ as Nicholas Carrcalculated for you: 1,752 kWh against 2,436 kWh per year. (If you are from a developing country your avatar is exceeding your annual real life use with 700kWh) http://www.roughtype.com/?p=611. Disruption: This is a much-abused word. To be disrupted is not something one should wish for and somebody deliberately trying to disrupt anything

JARGON ALERT


should be in jail. The thing you should grasp is that PSS are ecosystems that favor disruption just like evolution favors brains. Disruption happens when a PSS becomes so successful that the smokes out the affected industry. Usually, this is accomplished by cracking a value chain and turn it into a multisided platform. And always the disruptor offers more choice, more speed, more ease and much more information leaving the disrupted behind in a pile of obsolete matter.Disruption happens because old industry, retail and service operations have never been able to serve more than a relatively small customer base: no long tail, only during office hours, not much choice. That is merely skimming the cream without getting even near to the pulse of their clients. Disrupted services grab a much bigger pie and in doing so shift the benefits and revenues. Evolutionary Potential: Products that remain unaltered forever will become Coelacanths: you may find one or two, but these will be an oddity. Success will be increasingly associated with the built-in, predestined ability to evolve without bothering users. Eventually, Products will be recognized as life forms. Groupness: a Clay Shirky coined word describing the desire, as well as the talent for human beings to operate in unison. This desire is not new but has always been suppressed by high ‘transactions costs’ (the cost incurred in making an economic exchange). In the old days, transaction costs could be lowered but never nullified. Packetization and communication developments have disrupted Coascean theory by making it possible that transaction cost become zero. Cleaning up a polluted forest in a single day by an unleashed crowd is now a potentiality leaving industrial cleaners with their multi million dollar contracts in the dust. Nano-watch: A watch too small for the naked eye was coined by Koot & Bie in one of their 80’s ‘Bescheur’ calendars.

Packetization: Puzzle your audience when discussing the transformation of physical matter to digital information. Platform: Substrates that enable at least two groups to exchange goods or services. The more interesting platforms are open and leverage the efforts of third parties. All parties engage in an evolutionary process. Competing with each other at increasing speeds, platforms evolve into unpredictable directions not even foreseen by the platform developers themselves. Servicizing: Not every dummy would know that the word ‘servicing’ actually first appeared in print in a 1999 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which was written to support a previous 1997 report proposing a concept of Extended Product Responsibility for American companies. The reports made explicit mention of PSS business models, especially resource circulation regarding sales items like electronics, refrigerators, automobiles and batteries.

In Papanek’s spirit, the EPA was basically trying to invert, or double back, the liberal idea of the freedom of a company to innovate in production, to include equivalent responsibilities for all the used materials that the production and distribution of that innovation involves, and produces as wastes.Off course in libertarian America the concept was considered a threat to free enterprise and thus totally unacceptable. Eventually a more watered down version, called ‘producer responsibility’ distributed responsibility among the various stakeholders of a product including the consumer. Similar concepts such as ‘product stewardship’ and ‘product lifecycle partnership’ arise here in the US out of an attempt to deal with these design responsibility issues.Since then though, the word ‘servicing’ more often refers to the historical transformation of manufacturing industries through crises of production in the 1990s. In the US, struggling with a decline of productivity and international competitiveness, business performances recovered by what they called ‘servicizing manufacturing’. This involved actually shifting emphasis from manufacturing to sales, financing, maintenance work, insurance, assurance, re-sales, and outsourcing.The fact that profitability increased through this reordering of business models is what gives ‘servicing’ its dollar-like promise.

Supply Chain: A one-sided market. Forget about them

SusProNet: EU-funded network on Sustainable Product Service Systems http://www.econcept.org/Is there any relationship with CRISP? Three-D printing: A catastrophic invention allowing amateurs to pollute the earth and waste finite resources. Designing objects requires professionals. Skip the word from your vocabulary, it makes you sound like a hobbyist. Refer to ‘Additive Manufacturing’ if you want to discuss the more promising version aiming at mass customization. Value Addition: Back in the days a product’s added value came from the production processes transforming raw materials into products. This is what the most creatives are still doing today: working on technological improvements, creating intellectual property, product image, brand names and taking care of aesthetic design and styling. All of that in an attempt to differentiate and diversify products to better respond to customers’ demands.

If you read this book, you understand that most of that is fighting a rear guard battle. In any advanced PSS, the customer itself becomes part of the system. The customers needs and wants, as well as the actual use of the PSS, is transparent and irons out imperfections and dictates upgrades. You as a Creative should direct your clients to invest in providing services in every part of the value chain.

Buzzwords


Gijs Ockeloen co owns and manages Reframing Studio. with his partner Matthijs van Dijk. We frame ourselves as a contemporary studio investing in the aesthetics of means – forging deep relationships between aesthetic response and responsibility.We are renowned for investing time into socially valuable design. Our work is driven by a strong desire to support and enable people to be ever increasingly connected to innovative material and social goods, and at the same time impact social conditions towards meaningful, productive, independent and harmonious livelihoods.

Although I know that everything in this book is very true, I am interested in your comments. Send it to me through email, twitter or facebook: [email protected] or participate in the Disqus panel on our website http://tinyurl.com/pevtjtb

Do you like the illustrations in this book? They are by designing antroplogists Ingrid Johanna Fløgstad ([email protected])

Thanks to independant writer Rachel O’ Reilly for mind boggeling discussions and straightening out misconceptions as well as for editting the entire text ([email protected] and http://racheloreilly.net/)

Want this text in paperback? You can order it at Lulu.com to be delivered at youtr doorstep (€7,50 including postage)http://tinyurl.com/proe9qy

You can download a PDF for free at http://tinyurl.com/pevtjtb

You can download a free E reader version at Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/

Buzzwords

read it and your professional lifewill never bethe same

The fun and easy way to understand what CRISP is about!

Inject morality into your creative professional life

Gijs Ockeloen Reframing StudioExpert contributor to CRISP MagazineCASD memberProgram Committee member

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3

4

5

6

78

9

10

1112

13

1

2

3

4

5

6

78

9

10

1112

13

3

1/10

4

56

7

89

2

towards

materialthe

world

towardshigh entropy

towards the intangible world ofinteractions

Quick Reference to Product Service Systems towards

living systems

rules here

consumer pressure

convenants

maximizing product use extending product life and minimize materials

greed

stubborness

shortsightedness

incompetence

self interest

mental laziness

criminal mindset

tracking & forcing the consumer

bribing the consumer

forcing the consumer

feathering the consumer

pampering the consumer

maximizing service use extending product life and minimize materials

data sphere

OPEN SOURCE PLATFORMS

MULTISIDED PLATFORMS

PLATFORMS*

SYSTEM COMPONENTS CONNECT consumer and manufacturer connect

consumer becomes part of system

crowd curated, open to user

SSP sdrawot SREVIRD

NOITAZITEKCAP

RETU

RNS

WAR

RAN

TIES

TRAD

E-IN

TRAI

NIN

G

FIN

ANCE

PRO

DUCT

ORI

ENTE

D PS

PAC

KAGE

S

HIT

& R

UN

COU

NTE

RFEI

T

SHO

DDY

GODS

LOU

SY M

ANUA

L

LOCK

IN C

ON

TRAC

T

PRO

DUCT

PRO

TECT

ION

RAC

KET

GIVE AWAYS

CORPO

RATE GIFT

TOU

CHPOIN

TS

CUSTO

M TO

UCHPO

INTS

RECALCULATIO

N PLAN

S

WU

PPIES

LOGO

BALLPOIN

T

CHECKPOIN

T

CUSTO

M CHECKPO

INT

CON

DITION

AL RECALCULATIO

N

USE O

RIENTED PS PACKAGES

SERVICE PROTECTIO

N RACKETE

in a single coherent value offering

matter axis

convergence towardsproductservice

packages

entr

opy

axis

SERVICIZATION DRIVERS towards HIGH ENTROPIC WASTE HIGH ENTROPIC WAST

E driven by S

ERVICIZATIO

N DRIVERS

SERVICIZA

TION DRIVERS

towards S

ERVICIZED PRODUCTS PRODUCTIZED SERVICES driven by PRODUCTIZATION DRIVERS

Exchanging matter and information

platform operating with selected providers, user choice

legislation

complexification

expensification

interacting with the consumer

courting the consumer

tailoring customer relations

opportunistic mindset

addicting the consumer

Groupness* (Shirky)

Accelerated innovation*

Wifi communication

Interface protocols

Exploiting Systems

Selling Matter

Profiting from Rape

Selling Results

products live here Services live here

chaos rules here

PSS is born here

PSS will mature here

for the Restt ofUs! - Reframing Studio · 10 PSS for Dummies 11 Chapter 1 Evolution of the Creative...

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