There is a lot to the approach I am advocating, so I’ll only touch on some of the elements in this comment.
For one thing, what is needed is a sophisticated sense-making system for the information flows of entire communities. Also there will be need for mapping social networks of various functional roles to understand how incentives are set up, who holds resistance to change or enhances it, and in which ways they do so.
Additionally, there are governing dynamics for the “core logic” of cultural narratives — an example being Economic Growth At All Costs that is built into our inflationary currency systems and the process of wealth extraction and hoarding that define what capitalism is all about. These will need to be adequately characterized for each community where a culture design lab is ongoing.
And then there will be ecological fitness where some cultural systems are well-suited to be resilient and promote community thriving in their ecosystems and while other cultural systems will have low fitness and be prone to systemic deterioration or rapid evolution to change them. These things will need to be ascertained by the research and analysis done in each culture design lab.
Also, there will be bioregional levels (as in multiple scales) where cultural systems may be adaptive at one or a few levels, but maladaptive at others. This can be seen in the current situation with cities that are profit-generating for a handful of large corporations and the investors who own them (the level of a corporate entity) but make the cities increasingly unequal and unaffordable to the majority of people living in them (low fitness at the scale of metropolitan area).
What we plan to do is create a prototyping process for how to set up and run culture design labs, then replicate this process — refining and improving as we go — to build a network of them in different locales around the world. Think of this as a massive semiotic learning system for humanity to gain the ability to shape its evolutionary trajectories at the local, regional, and planetary scales.
I suspect this raises more questions than it answers, but I hope it helps. ;-)
