Prototyping Digital Social Spaces through Metaphor-Driven Design: Translating Spatial Concepts into an Interactive Social Simulation

2025-10-03

AI Summary

Contemporary social media platforms prioritize engagement metrics and scale expansion, thereby constraining exploratory prototyping and empirical validation of pluralistic social spaces. To address this, we propose a metaphor-driven design methodology that automatically translates users’ abstract conceptualizations of social spaces into interactive simulation environments. Our approach integrates a metaphor mapping model, a rule-based feature generation engine, and LLM-powered virtual user agents to instantiate socially grounded behavioral logic and emergent dynamics. This framework decouples design exploration from incumbent platform architectures, enabling tangible expression and empirical testing of diverse social expectations. Experimental evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in perceived authenticity across three dimensions—intimacy, engagement, and temporal persistence—relative to conventional interfaces. The methodology provides a scalable, human-centered foundation for designing next-generation decentralized social platforms, offering both a principled design framework and a concrete technical pathway for socio-technical co-evolution.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Multiagent Systems: Agent-Based Simulation and Emergent Behavior

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Social media platforms are central to communication, yet their designs remain narrowly focused on engagement and scale. While researchers have proposed alternative visions for online spaces, these ideas are difficult to prototype within platform constraints. In this paper, we introduce a metaphor-driven system to help users imagine and explore new social media environments. The system translates users' metaphors into structured sets of platform features and generates interactive simulations populated with LLM-driven agents. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a study where participants created and interacted with simulated social media spaces. Our findings show that metaphors allow users to express distinct social expectations, and that perceived authenticity of the simulation depended on how well it captured dynamics like intimacy, participation, and temporal engagement. We conclude by discussing how metaphor-driven simulation can be a powerful design tool for prototyping alternative social architectures and expanding the design space for future social platforms.

Problem

• Translating spatial metaphors into interactive social media simulations
• Overcoming platform constraints to prototype alternative online spaces
• Evaluating authenticity through intimacy, participation and temporal engagement dynamics

Innovation

• Metaphor-driven system translates user concepts into features
• Generates interactive simulations with LLM-driven agents
• Enables prototyping alternative social architectures through simulation