11. Social Interactions in Post-design Phases in Product Development and Consumption: Computational Social Science Modeling

This chapter presents a system to model social interactions between producers and consumers in the post-design phase. Producers form their expectations about consumer behavior during the pre-design and design phases. Consumers’ 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, producers 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 regarding the mutual influence of producer and consumer values on the trajectory of design improvements. Exemplary results are presented.