Socially-Conscious Service System Design in the Digital Era: Research Agenda

Digital technology is being integrated in various scenes and processes of our industry and society. Meanwhile, there is a growing concern about the rapidly progressing digitalization. Social responsibility in digitalization is becoming a global agenda in the research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. While various principles and guidelines have been proposed by the international authorities, NGOs and national governments, these principles are still too abstract to provide significant impact to actual technology development and integration processes. Service researchers, especially in the service science and engineering communities, have been interested in development and integration of digital technologies in service systems. Various concepts of technology-embedded or -assisted service system as well as methods for designing and developing them have been proposed. However, research on managing social impacts, including negative effects by using digital technologies, for service system design is still very limited. This study aims at developing a socially-conscious design method for digital technology assisted service system. In this paper, we first introduce the theoretical background of this study. Because digital technologies tend to bring a broad range of impacts to our society, it is important to take diverse values of various stakeholders into consideration. In addition, long-term evolution of service systems induced by digital technologies and the corresponding impacts on stakeholders should be examined. Therefore, we adopt scenario design and value sensitive design (VSD) to better understand the system of interest. Based on these theoretical foundations, we illustrate the research framework for designing digital technology assisted service systems, consisting of three main topics; system modelling, design process and assessment method.