There has been an increasing need for new robot development as more robots get introduced in homes and public spaces. Accordingly, industrial design programs are facing the demand of having robots covered in their curricula. However, dealing with robots in studio courses is challenging for design educators due to robots’ unique nature of autonomous and dynamic behavior, and their connectivity to a bigger system. While traditional industrial design practice has focused on discovering user needs and translating them to desirable, feasible, and viable physical products, the complex nature of robots asks for new design approaches and methods. This paper proposes to view a robot as a product-service system based on systems thinking and examines the methods for designing mobile robots that have been applied to studio projects at a university’s industrial design program. It starts with analyzing the characteristics of mobile robots from the literature on human-robot interaction (HRI), which leads to a need to understand and design robots from a large system perspective with service as one of the core components. At the same time, robots are interactive physical artifacts with complex internal components. Accordingly, visual mapping tools from service design and interaction design are examined and their adjusted forms are proposed to better fit designing mobile robots. By taking three years’ accumulation of studio projects as case studies, this paper further looks into the application of the proposed approach and tools, design process, and outcomes, followed by discussions on the effectiveness and limitations of this approach.