The engineering design community has increased their focus on sustainable development, which has resulted in design methodologies and optimization techniques for the design of socio-technical systems involving engineered products. An essential part of design for sustainable development is understanding the social impacts that technology has on people. Social impact diffusion can model how these impacts propagate through society. This paper combines social impact diffusion models, graph-based socio-technical representations, and computational optimization techniques to present a social impact diffusion objective function for optimizing social impact in socio-technical systems. The results of the paper indicate that using social impact diffusion objective functions can improve upon random or best guess designs for socio-technical systems.
