Evolutionist institutional design is conceived as an applied policy method in evolutional economics. Although the concept ‘design’ sounds artificial planning and construction, it is possible to introduce a new way of ‘design’ based on the natural, complex and non-deterministic properties of evolution, that is quite different from such constructivist design as socialist economic planning, nor such mechanism design as market socialism and auction design.

Evolution can be regarded as a natural and social complex phenomena constituted by the principles of variation, replication, selection and self-organization. In evolutionary process, causal agents (individuals or groups of individuals) interact mutually and with their environments based on their own replicators (such inner institutions, on the one hand, as strategies of games, cognitive frameworks, and psychological biases and such outer institutions, on the other, as rules of games).

Such media as languages, laws and moneys can be regarded as platform institutions because they determine the fundamental ways of cognition and action of agents so that agents can interact based on such common priors. Money in general is a symbolically generalized communication media that, existing in the meso-domain, mediates socio-economic performance and patterns in the macro-domain and motives and cognitive frameworks in the micro-domain.

Conventional national currencies are platform institutions that determine the grand design (basic replicators) for capitalistic market socio-economy to evolve. Local or complimentary currencies that can express both economic and social/cultural value are different kinds of platform institutions that can gradually change basic replicators as outer and inner institutions of agents and potentially can evolve from capitalistic market socio-economy to non-capitalistic market-economy.