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

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Serviceology for Services (ICServ 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1189))

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgement

This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19H04416.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Chiba, 277-0882, Japan

    Kentaro Watanabe & Takeshi Takenaka

  2. The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan

    Yusuke Kishita & Kaito Tsunetomo

Authors
  1. Kentaro Watanabe
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  2. Yusuke Kishita
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  3. Kaito Tsunetomo
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  4. Takeshi Takenaka
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kentaro Watanabe .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of AIST, Tokyo, Japan

    Takeshi Takenaka

  2. Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Spring Han

  3. Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

    Chieko Minami

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Watanabe, K., Kishita, Y., Tsunetomo, K., Takenaka, T. (2020). Socially-Conscious Service System Design in the Digital Era: Research Agenda. In: Takenaka, T., Han, S., Minami, C. (eds) Serviceology for Services. ICServ 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1189. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3118-7_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3118-7_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-3117-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-3118-7

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