Design as Event — Discipline-Level Definition

Foundational Statement This document constitutes the primary and authoritative field-definition text of the Design as Event research program. All subsequent publications within the corpus must be interpreted in structural and conceptual relation to this document. Design as Event establishes design as an event rather than a process unfolding within apre-given temporal container. Design is understood as the constitutive act through whichtime becomes ontologically and aesthetically intelligible for form. The primary unit of designis neither the artefact nor the workflow, but the evental configuration that institutes a legiblepresent—a condition of intelligibility in which coherence, relevance, and unity becomeperceptible. Form is not produced as a terminal outcome nor selected as an image; itstabilizes contingently as a limit through morphogenetic regulation. Time does not operateas measure or duration, but as a constitutive condition organizing continuities, ruptures,repetitions, delays, and thresholds. The virtual is not hypothetical; it is an operativedimension of the real event, a structured reserve of potentials that acts without beingexhausted by a single actualization. New media of simulation do not represent form; theyparticipate in the constitution of the temporal conditions under which form becomesnecessary.