A Design Management and Design Thinking Approach for Developing Smart Product Service System Design: Projects from Online Industrial Design Studio

Industrial design as profession has begun to expand its scope in business practices with the recent developments in design management, design thinking, and technology. However, curricula of industrial design studio remain traditional and mainly focuses on designing products. In fact, design management and design thinking go beyond product design and expand design’s scope to establishing business strategies, design innovation and service design by positioning humans and their needs at the center. Besides, the technological shift happened through Industry 4.0 enables to adapt IT hardware into systems, products and services, and make them smart and unified. To keep up with these paradigm changes and prepare our students to the rapidly changing business environment, we initiated a Smart Product Service System (Smart-PSS) design project with the 3rd-grade students of Bahçeşehir University in the 2019-2020 Spring semester during which online education had just become a part of our lives. In this article, we present three student projects as case studies of Smart-PSSs designed in three stages as system design, product design, and interface design. As a result, students gain a more holistic approach toward the design process, acknowledge the new expansions of industrial design, and its transformative role for businesses.