Designing Dhammacracy: An Ethnography of Design Activism and Cosmopolitical Representation in Thailand, analyzes how and why design has become a powerful field of activism in Thai politics. While three competing political institutions—the military, the monarchy, and the parliament—vied for power in Thailand between 2009-2019, groups of activist architects attempted to change political relations in the polity by transforming a shared cosmological form, the Hindu and Buddhist mythological form of Mt Meru, into both the country’s new parliament (the world’s largest) and a $90 million temporary royal crematorium. Based on 18 months of fieldwork with the architects that designed these buildings, Designing Dhammacracy theorizes how Thai architects configured their design practice as a political praxis during the conjuncture of two interregna: first, the only royal succession in 70 years and, second, the ruling dictatorship’s specious restoration of democracy. The dissertation proposes two arguments at the nexus of political, design, and linguistic anthropology.First, Designing Dhammacracy ethnographically studies the materialization of a political ideology that I am calling “dhammacracy,” which emerged from the interregna’s crucible of popular, dictatorial, dhammic and royalist sovereignties and materialized spectacularly in the design and politics of the new Thai parliament building. The architects called their design “Sappaya Saphasathaan,” which they translate as “a place for dhamma and doing good deeds.” Dhamma is a transcendent moral order and truth, embodying the wisdom of Buddha. This dissertation argues that dhammacracy materializes in political projects (like the design activism of the Sappaya Saphasathaan) within which diverse human, nonhuman, and metahuman agents leverage the ideological affordance of the opaque, predestined, and transcendent force of dhamma, on the one hand, and of democratic visions of political representation, on the other, in ways that successfully tarry between the contradictory political ideals of the dhamma and the demos as the bases for political legitimacy. In dhammacracy, distinctions between architectural and political representation collapsed when designers referred to themselves as ‘design activists’ as well as ‘representatives’ acting on behalf of their respective constituency. Moreover, their cosmological designs, forms, materials, and spaces were themselves considered activists, designed to orient their human counterparts through the mercurial cosmos of Thai politics. As such, Designing Dhammacracy ethnographically studies the cosmopolitics of design, drawn from the contested assemblages of the dhamma and the demos in the details of dhammacratic architecture. Second, the rise of design activism in the interregna is due, I argue, to the felicitous compatibility of design ideologies with dhammacratic aesthetics of political change. The liminality of the interregna, the ideological framing of design as a technique for improving its phenomena, and Theravada semiotic ideologies converged into the second related concept of this dissertation: “designification” (design-ification), which describes the metasemiotic capture of citational transformation within ideologies of design. In designification, activists configure the transformation between the citing de-sign and the cited sign as an ameliorative process with positive entailments for the future interactions the designed citation (re)mediates. I argue that within the interregna’s convolution of competing sovereignties, design activists leveraged the semiotic play of citationality through three processes of designification—representation, visualization, and materialization—to design agentive forms, materials, and spaces capable of acting within the ambiguous political tensions of dhammacracy.