To stimulate a discussion about the many ways in which culture influences the practices of technology design, I present examples of technologies and digital applications whose designs were explicitly informed by cultural theory. In 1999, a research group at Xerox PARC built an interactive museum exhibit called The resulting exhibit explored different facets of the nature of reading in a digital culture. In describing those moments when cultural theory, values, and conventions become an explicit part of the design process, I reflect on the technological imagination at work, and how the exercise of this imagination, in turn, results in the development of new literacies, modes of expression, as well as devices and digital artifacts.