Design Futures after Buddhism: Worldmaking by Other Means

Design increasingly shapes the future not through objects alone, but through systems—interfaces, environments, infrastructures, algorithms, and protocols that organize relations, behavior, and perception. As design expands into planetary, computational, and ecological scales, it faces an urgent need for conceptual frameworks that can address interdependence, temporality, and distributed agency. This symposium positions Buddhism not as a religious or aesthetic tradition, but as a historically deep mode of relational thinking that resonates with contemporary design concerns. Long before modern design disciplines, Buddhist practices engaged worldmaking through spatial circulation, ritual technologies, temporal modeling, ethical systems, and perceptual training. “After Buddhism” names a translation rather than a conclusion: how these modes of thinking are reactivated, transformed, or contested under present conditions of technological acceleration and ecological entanglement. We invite designers, architects, artists, technologists, and scholars to contribute speculative, critical, or practice-based work that explores alternative ways of designing futures—worldmaking by other means.

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The conference and events are generously supported by the Tzu Chi Foundation.