Every act of design is a cosmological act. Each time we make something, we contribute to the making of a world.
Every space encodes a worldview. The arrangement of a room, the orientation of a building, the relationship between interior and exterior, between light and shadow, between the human body and the cosmos — these are never purely functional decisions. They carry assumptions about what matters, how life should be organized, and what kind of world is worth building.
Design Cosmology is the practice of becoming literate in this dimension of spatial practice — learning to read the worldviews built into spaces, and to bring conscious intention to the environments we design, inhabit, and lead. It draws on architectural theory, cultural cosmology, indigenous spatial knowledge, Asian spatial philosophy, and the philosophy of technology — particularly the work of Yuk Hui on cosmotechnics — to develop a cross-cultural and historically grounded understanding of how spaces have always reflected and reproduced the belief systems of the cultures that made them.
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NOVEL COSMOLOGIES
Worldviews are not found. They are made — assembled, and realized in lived experience.
The cosmological turn names a shift already underway in contemporary thought: from reading existing worldviews toward actively composing new ones. Donna Haraway's speculative fabulation and multispecies worlding, Rosi Braidotti's nomadic, posthuman subjectivity, and the cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour — the practice of assembling a common world out of many, non-reducible ones — all treat cosmology as something constructed in practice, not simply inherited or recovered.
Design Cosmology takes up this turn as a working method. A novel cosmology is not retrieved from an established tradition — it is assembled, site by site, community by community, problem by problem, out of multiple worldviews held together rather than reduced to one. Design becomes a way of taking part in — co-creating — cosmological order, rather than fitting into a view already settled in advance. This is truly polycosmological: many cosmologies, actively composed rather than inherited.
POLYCOSMOS approaches cosmology not as a historical subject but as a living practice: a resource for designers, thinkers, educators, and organizations ready to ask what kind of world their spaces are building, and to answer that question with intention.
Design Cosmology develops along three connected capacities:
Cosmological Literacy
The ability to read the worldviews encoded in localities and spaces across cultures and periods — and to recognize those assumptions at work in contemporary environments.
Cross-cultural Spatial Knowledge
Engagement with non-Western spatial traditions — from indigenous cosmologies to Asian spatial philosophy — as active resources rather than historical reference.
Cosmological Design Position
For practitioners: a sharpened ability to articulate and defend the cosmological dimension of design decisions — in the studio, with clients, and in public discourse.
