Fashion simulator

Software	Any powerful OO language.
Covers	OO system development, simulation modelling, sociology of fashion diffusion processes.
Skills Required	Programming, OO systems design, interest in clothes and/or music and/or the relationship between technology and society.
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

Why do people wear the clothes they wear, have the haircuts they have, listen to the music they listen to, fit the kitchen units they fit, buy the electronic gadgets they buy...? All these choices are strongly influenced by what people are exposed to - no one is going to buy your album, no matter how brilliant it is, if they never get to hear it. But the processes through which different kinds of products get known about and adopted differ in interesting ways. People are fairly free to listen to different music, but in other industries there are very powerful pressures to standardize on one dominant product because there are strong advantages to everyone using the same thing - hence the dominance of Microsoft Word. But what gets standardized on can have more to do with marketing and luck than on technical quality (for instance, the view is widespread that Betamax was a better videotape technology than VHS). And how fashion works is a very complex question that sociologists and fashionistas have debated for over a hundred years.

The challenge of this project is to build a computer simulation of technology/fashion/music/whatever adoption processes, to model the spread of different kinds of products through user populations, and the failure of other products, and see how what happens changes under different sets of assumptions about how and why people choose to use particular products.

This is likely to be easiest starting by modelling the popularity of music in terms of record sales (in the days when there were such things) or listens on Spotify; and then looking at whether the complications involved in other kinds of adoption process can be incorporated into the model.

Extensions

A really ambitious extension would be to build a game on top of a working simulation, where people invest in particular types of products and win or lose according to how successful they are in the market.

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