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The integrated design capability for people-centered value is essential in industry competitiveness as well as in people’s living. Here, integrated design stands for systematically integrated planning, concept design and realization design reflecting diverse viewpoints. Recently, the value creation paradigm in industry is shifting toward value creation through Product-Service Systems (PSS) where product and service elements are tightly integrated as systems. Ideally, in PSS, service issues should be dominant rather than product issues. The key in PSS design would be designing activities of various stakeholders considering interaction with other stakeholders as well as products. In this paper, a systematic methodology for designing services using context-based activity modeling method is presented together with examples of new activity designs.

Design thinking as a mindset and as a process for design and business innovation receives a lot of attention. Thus, concrete and structured methods for design thinking need to be devised, and design thinking competencies should be fostered proactively. Design thinking is underpinned by visual thinking composed of interactive iterations of Seeing&mdash, Imagining&mdash, Drawing. The visual reasoning model developed to understand and support visual thinking describes the process with cognitive activities as well as knowledge and schema. The visual reasoning model could serve as a framework to devise structured methods and tools for design thinking and to foster design thinking competencies. It would be desirable if schema to serve as underlying models in imagining service activities are to be identified so that cognitive activities in seeing&mdash, imagining&mdash, drawing can be systematically structured in service design, where the objects of designing are human activities and experiences. In this paper, three structured design methods developed for service design have been described and characterized in the framework of the visual reasoning model. Particularly the context-based activity modeling has been demonstrated as schema in structured imagining of service activities for product-service systems, as it serves the underlying role in organizing information on human activities consistently and yet with different interactions with other constituents of these three imagining methods.