1. Culture Design Lab
A Research Center Dedicated to the Science of Intentional Change
Prepared by Joe Brewer
March 2016
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2. Addressing the Great Global Crisis With Rigor and Clarity
Humanity needs a science of intentional cultural change. The only way for us to
arrive at a thriving planetary future is through a deliberate, well-designed, collective
process. Otherwise the 7.4 billion of us alive today (and our descendants) will not
successfully navigate the complexities of 21st Century globalization.
The mission of the Culture Design Lab is to monitor, analyze, and design effective
patterns of cultural change—using the rigor of academic research to change the
trajectory of the real world in practical terms. Accomplishing this will require a
collaborative network of researchers and design practitioners helping guide
humanity through the paradigm shift that is needed for our collective survival.
Humanity is now confronted with a set of wicked problems that are complex
interdependent, and global. Examples include human-caused climate change,
ocean acidification, resource wars, the breakdown of ecosystems, mass migrations,
the rise or fascism, failed nation states, massive wealth inequality, global poverty,
and the corrupting influences of money in politics, to name a few. With an
exploding population, rising demand, depleted supply, and a political-economic
imperative to make profit for a few off the labor of the many we are on a path
toward global overshoot-and-collapse.
This means the end of everything we value for ourselves, our communities, and all
future generations.
We must do better. How?
We need systemic solutions that work with natural evolutionary processes to design
cultural change tactics and strategies.
Luckily, just as the need is most urgent, new developments in the study and
management of social complexity finally make it possible to apply design thinking
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3. to the great global crisis. This has already been done on the local scales using team
management, group facilitation, and organizational development tools.
Now is the time to do it at the level of bioregions, global trade networks, and for
the management of planetary assets like the Amazon rainforest and the world’s
ocean.
We are now in the planning stage for creating the Culture Design Lab. Among the
expert knowledge and methodologies we will deploy are:
✦ Cultural Evolutionary Studies :: How ideas, behaviors, and practices
spread across social systems while evolving through selection and fitness
processes.
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An Example — Watching Economic Ideas Spread
The stories we tell about economic systems have strong influences on the
policies that get adopted by governments and the management practices of
investors, entrepreneurs, and employees within organizations.
Powerful tools exist for studying discourse that reveal how these stories are
structured, where they come from, how they are reinforced (or marginalized)
in learning environments like business curricula, as processes of inculturation
through myths and fairy tales taught to children, and in the framing of media
stories in the press.
The Culture Design Lab will bring together researchers like data scientists
who study social analytics on the web and linguists who reveal the logic of
narratives in the frames and metaphors that are commonly used in a given
culture. This kind of research is readily applicable in media creation for
culture change campaigns and to guide the formulation of crisis management
policies.

4. ✦ Complexity Science and Systems Thinking :: How interacting parts
give rise to systemic behavior through feedback loops and governing
dynamics.
✦ Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences :: How the workings of the human
mind shape perception and belief and the manner in which social networks
influence behavior.
✦ Scenario Planning and Group Facilitation :: How groups work
together to create shared agendas and while tracking trends and patterns
that help them make sense of what is changing in the world.
We are currently in the exploratory phase of planning and will incubate this
research center through a series of experimental projects with partner
organizations in our network.
The principal partners at this stage are:
1. The Evolution Institute :: A think tank with the mission of applying
evolutionary thinking to everyday life.
2. The Rules :: A global network of activists and organizers focused on
addressing the root causes of inequality and poverty.
3. The Cultural Evolution Society :: A community of researchers and
design practitioners interested in the advancement of cultural evolutionary
studies.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to get involved and help make the Culture1
Design Lab a success in 2016 and beyond.
Sincerely,
Joe Brewer
Culture-Designer-in-Residence
The Evolution Institute
http://www.changestrategistforhumanity.com1
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