1.    Motivation and Problem Layout

Offering product-service systems as a combination of technical-physical goods and aligned services is gaining more and more importance. Therefore companies are increasingly required to (re-) develop new and complex service offerings. This is bundled with the challenge to communicated about with stakeholders, test and decide upon service concepts during the development process. In other development disciplines prototyping is a well-established technique to support the development process, yet in on the development of services the usage of prototypes has been barely researched and is not widely used in the practice. In contrast to the development of physical products another approach is necessary, due to many, partly interdepended, dimensions of concern that need to be considered and designed. In order to design, decide, or give feedback upon developers, managers, or customers must be able to experience a service prototype from their individual perspectives without disconnecting their perspective from all other dimensions that are necessary to be considered.

2.     Aim of Research and ResearchApproach

Within the dimenSion project a methodology will be developed to design and experience services as realistic as possible. Depending on the state of development and the level of complexity of a service, different prototyping techniques are necessary. In order to classify and arrange service development activities with corresponding prototyping methods, a taxonomy will be developed. Further more to (re-)develop and improve the envisioned techniques, a set methods and tools for visualizing and interacting with the prototypes, and based on the subject-oriented formalism, will be developed and investigated.  Solutions will be scalable, starting from desktop-pc based environments up to full-scale virtual reality set-ups. Development will be based on different use-cases and the corresponding requirements of the according project partners. Thus the results will be methods for service prototyping that have been evaluated in six different development projects ranging from interconnected information management to certification training courses.

3.     Utilization

The results of the research projects will directly benefit the involved companies that have to cope with increasingly complex service development tasks.
The efficiency and chances of success of development processes will be increased, driven by optimizing communication during development of services allowing for early discovery and consequently avoidance of conceptual weaknesses.
Based on the broad spectrum of use-case a high relevance for all kinds of practical applications can be guaranteed for the project results. From scientific point of view the result should interest future cooperation partners, but more importantly lay the foundation for further research into the domains of service engineering, process modelling and the application of virtual reality technologies. Furthermore the result will directly benefit students of both research institutions getting access to the newest research results.