Social Interactions in Post-design Phases in Product Development and Consumption: Computational Social Science Modeling - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 146

An important feature of the production recipe approach is that Producers can
gain experience in one set of Products that lowers its costs for other Products in the
'adjacent possible' region of design space. However, because the Producer does not
have full knowledge of the design space, the trajectory of design choices emerges
through a series of local/limited decisions, adaptations, and also constraints of
attention. It is not governed by foresight or planning.
11.4.2 Consumers
Consumers search the landscape for attractive Products to consume, and they form
social networks in the process. Consumers modify their values through direct
product interaction (evaluating and consuming Products) and through social inter-
actions. Consumption decisions and subsequent learning are mediated by two
independent variables—'value' and 'utility'. 'Value' is the Consumer's appraisal
of a Product based on its surface characteristics, relative to that Consumer's ideal.
Thus, valuation is performed prior to any consumption decision. Consumers choose
to consume based on their perception of product signature, perception of proximity
to their ideal type, and a rough expectation of utility. Generally, Consumers choose
to consume when the Product they encounter is close to their ideal type. The space
of possible Product signatures is called the Value Space. The value system for each
Consumer centers on a single vector that represents the signature of its ideal product
type. Consumers learn and adapt by adjusting this vector through experience and
social interaction. Therefore, each Consumer's value vector can be represented as a
point in Value Space, and their changing values as paths through Value Space.
In contrast, 'utility' is the benefit that the Consumer receives after consuming the
Product. It can only influence future consumption decisions through agent learning
and, indirectly, through social interactions. In the current implementation, there are
three possible utility functions (Fig. 11.2 ) .
Figure 11.3 shows a simplified block diagram of the agent architecture. Com-
pared to other agents in the social network influence literature, these agents have a
rich architecture that includes both symbolic and sub-symbolic reasoning. This was
necessary to implement situated cognition, which was one the primary research
goals. Due to space limitations, we will only describe perception, conception,
situation, valuation, and social interaction functions.
Perception is the collection of functions that enable the agent to focus and
organize their sensations according to their current situation, their expectations,
and past experiences. Consumers perceive Product signatures using a Self-
organizing Map (SOM, also known as Kohonen Networks). SOMs are a type of
neural network that are trained via unsupervised learning. Essentially they perform
a mapping from the sensed Product Signature to a condensed 2D internal represen-
tation of the Products. This is functionally equivalent to conceptual spaces, as
described in G¨rdenfors ( 2004 ). Perception is updated every step, but is only
processed when new sensations arrive.