Service - Oriented Challenges for Design Science: Charting the "E"-volution

This article links service-dominant (S-D) logic and design science to advance service system design, which is characterized by the indeterminacy of the design problems and outcome measures. Although much progress has been made in IT and IS toward service-orientation, these developments are often adaptations of goods-dominant (G-D) logic, rather than a full transition to a service orientation. In this paper, the “e”-volution of systems design, transitioning from G-D logic to S-D logic, is described and the IS design challenges implied by S-D logic are identified. To devise new, service-oriented modeling, methods and evaluation measurements, S-D logic endorses a fundamental shift in design thinking for design science from “bounded rationality” for problem solving to “expandable rationality” for design for the unknown.