The Challenges and Opportunities of Graph Based Social Impact Diffusion Modeling for Socio-Technical Systems

Critically evaluates a graph-based social-impact diffusion theory for socio-technical systems, identifying key challenges and opportunities.

This paper reviews and critically examines a recently published theory for evaluating the social impacts of engineered products as they diffuse through society. The theory represents socio-technical systems as graphs and models how impacts propagate ("diffuse") across different levels of society — individual, household, neighborhood, city, and beyond.

The authors revisit this graph-based diffusion theory because of its potential to advance predictive socio-technical modeling through a deterministic algorithm for calculating social impact across these multiple societal levels. The paper works through a numeric evaluation of the approach to surface where it succeeds and where it runs into practical or theoretical limitations.

By laying out both the challenges (e.g., data, modeling assumptions, computational complexity) and opportunities of this graph-based approach, the paper aims to guide future refinement of social impact diffusion models for use in engineering design.

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APA

Mattson, C. A., McKinnon, S., Broadbent, J., Cook-Wright, J., Detiege, I., Hardy, J., Little, A., & Geilman, T. (2025). The challenges and opportunities of graph based social impact diffusion modeling for socio-technical systems. In Proceedings of the ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC2024-169659). Anaheim, CA. https://doi.org/10.1115/IDETC2024-169659

MLA

Mattson, C. A., et al. "The Challenges and Opportunities of Graph Based Social Impact Diffusion Modeling for Socio-Technical Systems." Proceedings of the ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC2024-169659, Anaheim, CA, 17–20 Aug. 2025.

Chicago (Author-Date)

Mattson, C. A., S. McKinnon, J. Broadbent, J. Cook-Wright, I. Detiege, J. Hardy, A. Little, and T. Geilman. 2025. "The Challenges and Opportunities of Graph Based Social Impact Diffusion Modeling for Socio-Technical Systems." In Proceedings of the ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC2024-169659. Anaheim, CA.

IEEE

C. A. Mattson, S. McKinnon, J. Broadbent, J. Cook-Wright, I. Detiege, J. Hardy, A. Little, and T. Geilman, "The challenges and opportunities of graph based social impact diffusion modeling for socio-technical systems," in Proc. ASME 2025 Int. Design Eng. Tech. Conf. & Computers and Information in Eng. Conf., Anaheim, CA, USA, Aug. 17–20, 2025, Paper IDETC2024-169659.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{mattson2025challenges,
  author    = {Mattson, C. A. and McKinnon, S. and Broadbent, J. and Cook-Wright, J. and Detiege, I. and Hardy, J. and Little, A. and Geilman, T.},
  title     = {The Challenges and Opportunities of Graph Based Social Impact Diffusion Modeling for Socio-Technical Systems},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ASME 2025 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences \& Computers and Information in Engineering Conference},
  address   = {Anaheim, CA},
  number    = {IDETC2024-169659},
  year      = {2025},
  month     = aug
}