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Abstract Product/service systems (PSSs) are increasingly found in markets, and more resources are being invested in PSS design. Despite the substantial research into PSS design, the current literature exhibits an incomplete understanding of it as a cognitive activity. This article demonstrates that the methods used to analyze product designers’ cognitive behavior can be used to produce comparable and commensurable results when analyzing PSS designers. It also generates empirical grounding for the development of hypotheses based on a cognitive study of a PSS design session in a laboratory environment using protocol analysis. This study is a part of a larger project comparing PSS design with product design. The results, which are based on the function–behavior–structure coding scheme, show that PSS design, when coded using this scheme, can be quantitatively compared with product design. Five hypotheses were developed based on the results of the study of this design session concerning where and how designers expend their cognitive design effort. These hypotheses can be used to design experiments that test them and provide the grounding for a fuller understanding of PSS design. 

This paper presents empirical evidence on which to ground the understanding of effects of a design support on Product/Service Systems (PSS) designing. The effects are measured by the extent of application of a systems perspective and level of integration of product and service elements during PSS designing. Protocol analyses of a control team and an experiment team, involving experienced practitioners performing an identical PSS design task are conducted. Only the experiment team is provided with the design support. The Function–Behavior– Structure ontology and a scheme for the systems perspective are utilized to code the data. Results show preliminary insight into the influence of a design support. The focus on systems level abstraction shows a three-fold increase, the cognitive effort spent on behavior of structure is halved and the effort on design description is more than doubled, in the experiment team.