In the early twenty-first century, designers and researchers have developed new methods, concepts, and frameworks that have enabled us to view the role of design as an active agent in driving both local and global cultural change. These insights and observations look beyond the activity of a particular practitioner or cultural group to see how shifts in the relationships between cultures, nations, and states have rapidly increased their porosity to external influences. This has occurred largely as a result of the capacity of digital communication technologies to transcend, transform, hybridize, and facilitate new forms of cultural exchange that question our relationship to context. As a result, we have begun to assemble a picture of the international shifts that have been driven by cultural transfer on the transnational plane and, by association, the trickiness of reconciling the partnership between nations and states in the twenty-first century. In a practical sense, this has led to the recognition that a nationally defined cultural group is very unlikely to reside in one location presided over by a single state. Fractured and misaligned borders, along with economic, climatic, and conflict-driven pressures have forced large groups of people into new locations around the world. Increasingly, the traditional mechanism of cultural nourishment linked to an ancestral homeland with its material affordances and affirmations of place and meaning have become stressed as digital reminders replace them. Immersive digital technologies (for example augmented reality, immersive web based gaming environment and second life) are increasing our capacity to live out more complex relationships to culture; in our multi-context, chameleon-like lives, physical cultural reminders struggle to maintain their traditional supremacy. These “imagined communities”—as described by Benedict Anderson—are becoming increasingly fragmented and are held together by more tenuous physical connections bolstered by digital mediums through which distortion, misalignment, selective representation, and technical limitations are introducing new agents of change affecting how cultural groups maintain and evolve their identity.