A teleonomic distributed cognition approach to architectural design

The purpose of this article is to explore a newly defined concept of distributed cognition in a spatial domain and to propose how this conceptualization may be applied to how architectural space is organized. A novel view of distributed cognition is presented, which is concerned with the purposive behaviour of an organism-in-its-environment. We term this concept teleonomic distributed cognition. Teleonomic distributed cognition is the ability of an organism (including humans) to interact with its environment for the purpose of satisfying its physiological (internal and external) and social needs in order to survive and sustain itself. An implication of this approach is that the sensory capabilities that drive the teleonomic distributed cognition of the organism define its spatial domain.