AI as Cosmotechnics takes its starting point from a term coined by philosopher Yuk Hui in The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016). Hui argues that technology has never been a neutral, universal instrument applied equally across all cultures: every technical tradition unites a cosmic order — a way of understanding the universe and our place within it — with a moral order and with concrete practices, materials, and places. Cosmotechnics names this unity: technology is always embedded in a specific cosmology, locality, and embodied way of life. Modern technology, including AI, is often presented as universal and culturally neutral. Its designers nonetheless build assumptions into it — about how we relate to reality, what forms of intelligence count as intelligence, and how we produce knowledge for building the future. Hui's call for a plurality of cosmotechnics, placing Chinese, Indigenous, and other technical-cosmological traditions alongside the dominant Western one, opens a space for design practices that ground technology in locality, materiality, and embodied experience.

This raises a fundamental question for design education: how does AI meet forms of knowledge rooted in embodied perception, situated experience, material sensibility, collective work, and the production of meaning?