Design as Event: Admissibility, Reconfiguration, and Morphogenetic Necessity

This preprint presents a theoretical framework proposing that design should be understood not primarily as a process unfolding within pre-given temporal structures but as an event that constitutes admissibility itself. The paper develops this thesis through three layers of argument. First, it identifies the limits of state-primary models of design explanation, including optimization and process-based accounts. Second, it introduces the concept of the ontological cut as the structural articulation through which admissibility and relevance hierarchies are reorganized. Third, it grounds design transformation in morphogenetic causality through the interaction of constraints, saturation thresholds, and immanent telos. An extended applied reconstruction in computational design demonstrates how admissibility reconstitution can be analytically identified when constraint topology and variable identity reorganize. The article concludes with methodological clarification, outlining reconstructive ontological analysis as a research-operational framework for distinguishing optimization from morphogenetic reconfiguration. The framework repositions design theory from process description toward explanation of how admissibility itself becomes constituted.