Danwen Ji, Kai Hu, Luis Alonso Pastor, Carlo Adornetto, Meng Wang, Kent Larson, and Yongqi Lou
Community simulation tools are typically designed to predict future outcomes and support decision-making through analytical representations of social systems. However, embedded community practitioners rarely encounter simulations as neutral forecasts. Their understanding of the community is already shaped through situated participation, tacit judgement, and ongoing relational experience. Under these conditions, predictive simulations often either appear reductive or simply reinforce existing assumptions.
This paper reframes community simulation not as predictive infrastructure, but as reflective provocation. We investigate how counterfactual “what-if” simulations can support practitioners in surfacing and reconsidering the tacit assumptions embedded within their understanding of community systems. Using a GraphRAG-LLM framework, we constructed counterfactual community trajectories by selectively removing different forms of community activity from a historical community graph, including long-term projects, short-term projects, events, and media practices. The research question is: how do embedded practitioners interpretively engage with counterfactual simulations of their own community, and under what conditions do such simulations trigger rather than inhibit reflection on their tacit assumptions?
We report findings from a qualitative study with ten embedded community practitioners who interacted with the simulation system through guided probing and reflective interviews. Rather than treating simulation outputs as authoritative forecasts, practitioners used the counterfactual scenarios as interpretive reference points for discussing participation inequality, relational continuity, organisational responsibility, and their own roles within the community structure. The simulations became valuable not because they produced accurate predictions, but because they created productive tensions between computational representation and lived experience.
The paper contributes a conceptual reframing of community simulation as an epistemic infrastructure for reflective practice. We argue that the value of counterfactual simulation in systemic design lies less in forecasting futures than in creating structured occasions for practitioners to question, negotiate, and reinterpret the assumptions shaping situated community action.
Keywords: counterfactual simulation, reflective practice, situated knowledge, community simulation, systemic design, social innovation