Products as communication platforms: Investigating and foretelling the evolution of product&service systems in the digital era

[EN] In the lifecycle of material products, information and communication have always played a prominent part that, in the digital era, is growing and is expected to grow further, also enabling the blooming of grass root and bottom-up changes in the galaxy of designproduction-retail systems. Retail services are not just a way to obtain goods: they provide opportunities for social relationship and cultural growth, and can be considered as a field for social innovation. Our research aims to investigate the systemic changes that are occurring in the realm of information and communication services for the retail of material products, and their consequences on design, production and distribution processes. Our goal is to outline strategic approaches to the design of innovative service/systems and, presently, we mainly focus on two key issues:

• • understanding and modelling the tangle of factors that determine the user experience in traditional and digital shopping processes;
• • develop design methodologies for the creation of new meaningful services, so to support the customers in the understanding of value and in the search of quality in shopping processes. The paper investigates new social behaviors related to shopping, such as show-rooming and web-rooming, and we demonstrate that the pervasive use of mobile devices produces new social phenomena in retail processes and enables new opportunities to create value in retail services. From the investigation of online and off-line markets, it emerges the importance of social dynamics and human interactions belonging to physical world: relational dynamics and knowledge acquisition processes play a very important role in the elicitation of senses and emotions, in cultural upgrading, value understanding, quality awareness, trust building. The analysis of these phenomena and the presentations of some design experiences bring us to the definition of some strategic directions guiding the generation of new paradigms of services in the retail field.