The social influences of digital technologies in the Design of S.PSS and DE: a literature review

Digital technologies have become essential in most parts of the world. Being leveraged by the covid-19 pandemic, they have been used to scale up and create new products and services in different sectors. It is a shared understanding that these disruptive technologies have caused profound changes in the structure of society and, particularly, opening discussions about ethics and democracy. The Sustainable Product-Service (S.PSS) and Distributed Economy (DE) systems models are win-win opportunities for sustainability, not only in the economic and environmental but also, in the social dimension, sometimes neglected. Despite the growing application of digital technologies, there are few discussions about their socio-ethical interference in the design of S.PSS and DE. This article is a systematic literature review to map the benefits and risks of digitization for the social dimension in these models. The selection criteria are based on six design strategies for the social dimension in S.PSS and DE developed within a set of projects conducted by the Learning Network on Sustainability (LeNS). This study aims to map and reflect on what is presented in the articles through those consolidated socio-ethical system design strategies. As a result, there is pointed a gap in ethics as a strategy for design in the digital era.