Introductory Chapter: Service Design for Emerging Technologies Product Development

This book was born from the idea of taking a comprehensive look at the current state of service design for product development in relation to emerging technologies. Such work requires holistic, multidisciplinary collaboration, particularly between service designers, marketers, businesspeople, managers, and engineers. New technologies trigger innovation and they have and will continue to shape our daily lives.

Making services itself is not an old research theme inside science, but the design of services has actually been recognized as a research topic in the early 1990s (Sun 2019). Sun (2019) recognizes that the flourishing of service design literature as we know it today in the design field is more from the early 2000. This all seems quite surprising how service design is still so new in the history of science and practice if we think that the services sector is considered being the main contributor to growth and employment in the EU (EU, 2016).  Also, the European Union has seen that it is essential to turn from Industry 4.0 to the 5.0 where competency is seen no longer as solely technology but greater focus on human centered strategies (European Commission, 2022, n.d.). 

Kimbel (2011) has investigated and written more about the differences between service design adopted in the design field in relation to engineering or marketing fields. We as editors of this book have looked at service design with a broad lens and it can be seen as service design, product service system, design for service or service ecosystem design to name a few.  In this chapter, the aim is to provide brief idea on the service design concept as well as providing the organization of the book.