ABSTRACT
This chapter presents product–service system design for sustainability and discusses its main sustainability benefits, limitations and unresolved issues, as well as its current and future research directions. It is widely agreed that reducing the environmental impact of products, although fundamental, is not on its own sufficient to obtain the radical improvements required to achieve sustainability. For this reason, there is a need to adopt a broader design approach, focused on producing structural changes in the ways in which production and consumption systems are organised. Within this perspective, product–service system innovations represent a promising approach. These innovations entail a shift from consumption based on ownership to consumption based on access and sharing, and can potentially decouple economic value from material and energy consumption. They are also considered crucial to enable circular economy models. Designing a product–service system requires shifting from product design thinking to system design thinking. Since the 2000s, several methods and tools have been developed to support the design of eco-efficient and sustainable product–service systems. Despite the potential to deliver a range of sustainability benefits, the diffusion of product–service systems with sustainability characteristics is still very limited, due to a range of cultural, corporate and regulatory barriers.
