Social Interactions in Post-design Phases in Product Development and Consumption: Computational Social Science Modeling - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 142

based on a worldview. Constructive memory makes memory a function of the
situation and the past. Memory is not laid down and fixed at the time of the original
sensate experience. What is remembered is constantly being recreated and reframed.
Interactions between agents trigger changes in situations and memories.
Through the lens of situated cognition, innovation in a social ecosystem is an
emergent phenomenon that arises from the interplay of situations, constructive
memory, and social interactions at the level of agents and networks of agents.
Moreover, we believe that situated cognition is at the heart of social processes of
creativity and inventiveness (Gero 1996 ; Sawyer and Sawyer 2012 ). This is espe-
cially relevant to emergent aspects of innovation (Finke 1996 ; Gero and Damski
1997 ; Gero 1996 ; Gero and Kannengiesser 2004 ; Sawyer and Sawyer 2012 ) .
For these reasons, situated cognition is foundational for any study of innovation
in social ecosystems (Edquist 2005 ; Llerena 2006 ) .
In the current implementation of our simulation, only Consumers are designed
with features to support situated cognition. In future work, we expect to add situated
cognition capabilities to Producers and other agent types.
11.3 Architecture of the Simulation System
There are two types of agents in the current implementation—'Consumers' and
'Producers'—and one type of artifact—'Products'. Throughout each simulation run
the population size is fixed for Consumers, Producers, and Products. The population
size is under experimental control and can range from ten to hundreds or thousands,
limited only by computer capacity and processing speed. To date, our experiments
have been run on a MacBook Pro laptop with 2.53 GHz dual core processor and
4 GB main memory, with a population of 100-200 Consumers and a similar number
of Products.
Consumers seek to consume Products by moving around a geographic
Consumption Space with micro-behavior similar to foraging, but with social inter-
actions. Consumers are not endowed with any knowledge or map of the Consump-
tion Space, nor do they have any memory of where they have been. The
Consumption Space is a bounded rectangular grid with von Neumann neighbor-
hoods, and the size of the Consumption Space is proportional to the population
size of Products and Consumers so that the spatial density remains constant.
This facilitates foraging micro-behaviors and minimizes behavioral artifacts that
might result from a physical landscape that was either too dense or too sparse.
In each clock cycle consumers can move to any neighboring point on the grid within
the boundaries. At each time step Consumers move around the landscape looking
for attractive Products to consume, or to maneuver out of crowded areas. Only one
Consumer can occupy a given grid location at a given time.
Consumers are social, while Producers are not. The social network among
Consumers is initialized as a 'small world' network with random assignments.