Social Interactions in Post-design Phases in Product Development and Consumption: Computational Social Science Modeling - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 137

Chapter 11
Social Interactions in Post-design Phases
in Product Development and Consumption:
Computational Social Science Modeling
Russell Thomas and John Gero
Abstract This chapter presents a system to model social interactions between
producers and consumers in the post-design phase. Producers form their expecta-
tions about consumer behavior during the pre-design and design phases. Con-
sumers' behaviors are a result of their interactions with designs based on their
experiences that form their value systems as well as their social interactions with
other consumers. Because the post-design phase includes consumer behavior, pro-
ducers reevaluate their plans and strategies for future designs. A subset of the
system is implemented to model social interactions where the producers and
consumers are modeled as computational agents. The agents' values that are used
to guide their decision-making are modified through the agents' interactions with
products and other agents. One of the goals of this work is to demonstrate the
viability of agent-based modeling to study innovation ecosystems and their social
aspects. Through computational experiments, we are able to test hypotheses regard-
ing the mutual influence of producer and consumer values on the trajectory of
design improvements. Exemplary results are presented.
Keywords Producers • Consumers • Social interaction • Agent-based modeling
• Situated cognition • Producer-consumer interaction