The Phenomenal Design Process is a architectural design and land development approach that integrates spiritual, energetic, and historical awareness into the design process. Unlike traditional architectural projects, which prioritize construction without deep engagement with the land, the Make Conscious approach ensures a harmonious and healing relationship between human development and the earth.

What makes it phenomenal?

When engaging with the phenomena of the world as a participant rather than an observer, the world itself becomes phenomenal. This engaged worldview leads to the transformation of site and sight into insight. Ultimately, the phenomenal world arrives when the alchemy of perception generates the reintegration of self and world.

What is a phenomenal data set?

Illuminating the phenomenal world through the phenomenal design process is to make the visible invisible, the invisible visible, the audible inaudible, the inaudible audible, or moving the yin and yang energies. What is considered “relevant” data in current fields of western dominated science and engineering only reveals the visible dimensions of the life cycles of ecologies. What is visible is what is already a tree, everything that is visible was once invisible, the tree was once a seed. Indigenous wisdom traditions focus on the seed dimension of existence, not the fruit. Extractive traditions of colonization focus on the fruit and not the seed. The purpose of listening and mapping is to generate a phenomenal data set that gives equal weight to seed:fruit balance, thus harmonizing the systems from the very beginning of the project. The result is a bridge between indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, (ways of being and ways of knowing) and contemporary design epistemologies and ontologies.