Interesting! Have heard about Christopher Alexander's work, but have never really jumped in. Maybe I should do that now.

I'm of the opinion right now that what we call "design" and "architecture" is really just the science of finding stable habitable zones in high-dimensional problem spaces.

Wow! Yes! Agree with this view that all design and organisation is mostly just the most optimal/favorable state for the entire system to be in. What constitutes as favorability might be low free energy, high interconnect, distributedness etc.

May I suggest you to look into the work of Jeremy England in a similar light of self-assembly and optimisation in non-equilibrium states? Some really really interesting takeaways there, me sharing some of my interpretations might constitute as epistemic noise as I'm not sure if I understand each bit of it completely well at a 100%.

There was a great article about him in Quanta, and you might want to check out his talk at Karolinska Institutet.

Thanks for the recommendations, and I'll look out for your talk!