A case study analysis of the furniture system from sustainable Product-Service System Design perspective

Studies on design for sustainability indicate that the concept of Sustainable Product-Service System (S.PSS) is a promising approach to bring radical changes in the production and consumption system with environmental, socio-ethical and economic benefits. The furniture system has been recently identified as one of the key sectors that should be addressed and improved for environmental sustainability and economic prosperity in the Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020). In this respect, this paper presents a case study research aiming to explore and characterise the offer model of S.PSS when applied to the furniture sector as a promising win-win approach towards sustainability. The result indicates that applying S.PSS in the furniture sector can bring win-win benefits for a low environmental impact and a high economic value, even though with some peculiarities compared to the known general win-win S.PSS economic and environmental benefits. Some reflections are given concerning this approach in the socio-economic crisis taken by the Covid-19, which is made around the opportunities that S.PSS applied to furniture can extend the access to high quality and well-designed furniture to even low-income individuals and entrepreneurs.