A Perspective Shift for a Human-Life-Friendly Product Service System (PSS)

Sustainability has become an important issue for both producers and consumers. On the production side, the Product Service System (PSS) has targeted environmental protection, economic value, and consumer satisfaction, while consumers have also sought to minimize environmental repercussions while maintaining efficiency. The ultimate goal of the PSS is to promote both sustainable production and sustainable consumption, in that sustainable production can only be achieved when the life cycle includes sustainable consumption. In other words, the PSS should maintain environmental value while improving consumers’ lives, and should influence not only the moment of consumption but also consumers’ lives as a whole. Based on this insight, PSS developers seek to understand and reflect the context of usage and consumers’ needs from the beginning. However, these attempts are often considered only in terms of product or service usage, rather than in terms of human daily life or a comprehensive consumer life pattern. Human daily life consists of various activities, and these activities are related to one another. Therefore, the development of a human-life-friendly PSS can be easier considering the suggested point of view in this paper. Therefore, this study selects and structures activities closely related to product service usage, and analyzes 59 PSS cases based on 61 consumer life domains selected from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) Activity Coding Lexicon to identify which life domains a PSS can satisfy. By examining the differences in PSS offerings for specific activities, this research provides the basic information for successful human-life-friendly PSS development in the future