THE CULTURAL WORK OF INNOVATING: CULTURES DESIGNING THEMSELVES RICHARD TABOR GREENE MASTER, DTMA BEIJING; PROFESSOR, KEIO UNIVERSITY, SYSTEMS DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT RICHARDTGREENE@ALUM.MIT.EDU ABSTRACT This paper is forest not tree—what the whole offers the particular. It counters academia's tradition of accumulating particulars (that Herbert Simon called “a weakness” of modern science). This paper induces abstract dimensions and theory (of design anthropology) from sixteen diverse cases across 40+ years, 3 continents, 11 industries. Dimensions of difference (itself a design method) for each pair of the 16 cases were articulated, then grouped by similarity across cases. The result a model of design anthropology as: 1 overarching reality—design as un-culturing, anti-designing, un- designing, civilizational self-negation, 5 forces influencing design, 5 influences on design from other Novelty Sciences, a 5-part ontology of design (designer, design purpose, design process, the design itself, design kinds), and 9 operations in designing: undoing rightnesses, global creation automata, crossing fields, undoing bias, expanding scope and scale, deploying design process protocols, applying negation powers, audience establishing and enchantment, model repertoires replacing single right-y models, designing sheer performance (a show business). Western civilization as a whole has been identified as a self- negating culture (of cultures) so design as as un- designing fits that essence interestingly. This elemental view of design as an operation within and of cultures that self-negate elucidates why traditional cultures “decorate” in festival design, though they self-negate in tooling design. INTRODUCTION Indigenous cultures, when they encounter the West, are puzzled by why Westerners and their systems break everything down into parts, they optimize, often ruining whole society traits in the process that they appear blind or oblivious to (Geertz 1981). Academics perpetuate these Western ways in their journal and paper norms— allowing ever narrower, more analytic, merely empiric results as if to move whole society elephants using ever smaller bees. Recently (Gottlieb 1993) spiritual movements in the West, like recurrent Buddhism, ethical movements, like the Environment movement, and others have challenged Western ways of researching and designing to stop forgetting or slighting wholes in their optimistic optimizations of parts. Fortuitously, the web's arrival, in our hands thanks to Mr. Jobs, and others, provided a ubiquitous hand-held affordable platform (in 2/3s of the world that is industrial already) for vastly expanding the scope of who designs and what they design for. That expansion of scope brings traditional cultures into designing and design outcomes in a big way, explored in diverse ways by the cases reported here. Social analogs of these web expansions are emerging (Greene 2001)—treating persons as computational entities in interesting and empowering ways. This paper presents sixteen very particular design and innovation cases, many from major culture change areas, product development programs, and major corporations, that all play the whole against the parts, and vice versa, in replicable ways and design algorithms. From these cases, this paper reports the induction of abstract dimensions of design and participatory innovation as culture work. The model of that, thusly produced, is then used to suggest future directions for an Anthropology of Design. A Proviso. This paper, to an extent, practices one trait of indigenous cultures, starting with views and questions of wide scope. From that expansive start point, it classifies, and distinguishes cases (and the ideas they embody) to come up with abstract dimensions of difference. Dimensions of difference is a formal design method (Greene 2001). Here we use it to design a theory, not a chair or product LITERATURE AND THEORY Participatory Innovation Conference 2012, Melbourne, Australia www.pin-c2012.org/ 1