86 applications. 13 countries. From the US and UK through Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Denmark, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Austria. Almost double last year’s field. 34 of this year’s applicants entered on a scholarship. Nearly two in five. If the future of this field is going to be shaped by more than whoever can afford a $45 entry fee.

Winners are announced live at Creative Biome, our online conference, on November 7th. Until then — the finalists!

The Finalists

Architectural and Interior Visions

• The Sphinx Gate — Mareesa Stertz, Tania Abdul, Jason Chase, Goose Manriquez (USA)

• Geometry of Sound — Cheyanne Ringler with Little Dinosaur, Gregg Fleishman, Edge Sound Research (USA)

Please note that the judging panel reached a unanimous consensus to forward only these top two entries. They advanced one clear winner and one undeniable runner-up rather than artificially selecting a second runner-up.

Art and Photography

• Meltspace — Antonietta Kies (USA)

• inside, outside, too close or too dirty, etc — Alex Valentina (Italy)

• Woven In Time — Phaneros Art / Matthew Lessard (USA)

Audio and Music

• Nature (Gathered) — East Forest, feat. Kishi Bashi & Ram Dass (UK)

• Bionic and the Wires — Jon Ross (UK)

Please note that the judging panel reached a unanimous consensus to forward only these top two entries. They advanced one clear winner and one undeniable runner-up rather than artificially selecting a second runner-up.

Educational and Community Impact

• Women Shaping Psychedelic Futures — Women on Psychedelics: Tian Daphne, Jessika Lagarde (Netherlands)

• The Lunisolar Framework for Integration — Victoria Sterkin, The Infinity Container (USA)

• Indigenous-Led Research & Experiential Studies in Plant Medicines — Drug Science: Dr Anne Katrin Schlag, Prof David Nutt, with OIOC’s Erika Salazar and Taita Juan (UK)

Experimental

• ARKANA | an edible oracle system — Joanna Wallace Cuervo (USA)

• Precision Psilocybin Standardization — Breanna DeVita, Psylutions (USA)

• Art That Awakens: A Life Worth Completing — Erin Long via Taylor Engle Anderson (USA)

Products and Services

• Mabel Microdosing — Pernille Brostrup, Mabel (Denmark)

• SoundSelf — Sandeep Prakash, Robin Arnott, Lorna Dune, Reef Liew (USA)

• Lucy, The World’s First AI Psychedelic Patient — Joshua White, Fireside Project (USA)

Storytelling

• Psychedelics: A Pocket Primer — Mattha Busby, Hoxton Mini Press (UK)

• My Twin the Murderer — Lindsay Kent, The Hallucinarrator (USA)

• Thunder Perfect Mind — Cassady Rosenblum with Cem Eskinazi, Ekin Balcioglu, Ege Okal, Ellie Chappelle (USA)

Visual Design and Branding

• Psymposium: Designing Legitimacy — Juan Ramirez with Carlos Alonso, Marta Pérez, Gerardo Gonzalo, and team (Spain)

• Thunder Perfect Mind — Cassady Rosenblum and team (USA)

• Tractor Beam — Claire Gustavson, Lana Z Porter, Tractor Beverage Company (USA)

Mushroom of the Year (public vote)

• Jeffrey Miller, HoneyProjects (USA)

• Kyle Rosner, 420Interactive / High Times / Reality Sandwich (USA)

• Dustin Hoxworth, Fat Nugs Magazine (USA)

Congratulations to everyone on this list — and to everyone who submitted. Getting a finished piece of work in front of 32 strangers with strong opinions is its own kind of finalist round.

We’ll see the winners revealed live at Creative Biome on November 6–7.

Tickets and the full programme are here.

New speakers announced: Christopher Timmermann, PhD, Co-Director, UCL Centre for Consciousness Research will be speaking with Michel Rojkind, Founder of Rojkind Arquitectos on “The Architecture of Ritual”. And Josh Rubin, Founder of COOL HUNTING, Creative Director, Editor and Photographer will be speaking with Yves Behar, Founder and CEO fuseproject on “Psychedelics and Design”.

Thanks to the generous support of our key awards partners COOL HUNTING, Design Week, Psychedelics Today, Liquid Culture Records, Nutritious, Blossom, Mycopreneur and MAPS.

September gave the field three hearings. The FDA held its public hearing on the future therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs on the 14th, in a conference room in Silver Spring. The World Ayahuasca Forum convened in Girona from the 11th to the 13th, with Indigenous spiritual leaders setting the terms of the conversation rather than being invited into someone else’s. And, The Economist asked whether AI systems could become conscious.

None of these are container questions in the therapeutic-space sense we usually mean here. But they are all, in their own way, questions about who gets to be in the room, on what terms, and who decides.

Written comments on the FDA hearing are open until October 5th. Our own Awards finalists are announced October 13th. The conference is six weeks out. It’s a month for paying attention to thresholds.

Warmly,

— Alexandra

ART & DESIGN

• A Trip to Transformation by Xavier Rousset

A Trip to Transformation explores whether psilocybin’s greatest potential lies in prevention, not just in treating illness. Psilocybin doesn’t just need to be a last resort. Psychedelic medicine is being hailed as a breakthrough. But in a reactive system, access is limited and comes too late.

Refusing to accept this as the only future, filmmaker Xavier Rousset travels through Australia, Oregon and the Netherlands to discover how safe, proactive psilocybin access overseas is already changing lives.

Help finish the film and learn all about it here: triptotransform.com

RESEARCH & IDEAS

• Could AI become conscious? — The Economist

The Economist’s leader on machine consciousness doesn’t argue AI is conscious now. It argues that as AI systems get better at sounding like they have an inner life, our intuition that they’re “just machines” will get harder to sustain, whether or not anything is actually happening inside them. Pope Leo’s May encyclical drew a hard line: AI systems don’t feel joy or pain, full stop and plenty of people agree with him. But nearly one in five young American adults already report an “ongoing personal friendship” with a chatbot, and China has started stripping human-like traits out of its bots specifically to limit emotional dependence. The line is being tested.

The psychedelic field has spent decades arguing that consciousness is not a fixed, binary property and that it has gradients, that non-human minds (fungal, plant, animal) may have forms of awareness we’ve been too quick to rule out. The same generosity of definition that expanded our sense of who’s conscious is now being pointed at machines. It’s worth asking whether that’s the same move, or its opposite.

Economist

BUSINESS & POLICY

• The FDA hearing, and what's still open

The FDA’s hybrid hearing ran just under four hours on September 14th at White Oak, gathering perspectives on provider training, patient safety, access, and data standardisation for psychedelic drugs in supervised settings — explicitly not on individual drug applications, scheduling, or legalisation. Days before, senior FDA official Michael Davis published a framework paper in NEJM describing the agency as “meeting this moment” on hard-to-treat conditions. Industry framing at the hearing pushed toward normalisation: Definium Therapeutics’ CEO told Reuters regulators should treat psychedelics “like normal drug development, normal science, normal medicine,” resisting the idea that the category needs unusually special treatment.

Action Item: You can submit public feedback through the Federal Register Docket FDA-2026-N-7542 before the 11:59 p.m. ET deadline on October 5, 2026.

Read an overview of the proceedings from Psychiatric Times.

Review expert safety and access commentary via Reuters.

EVENTS AND CONVERSATIONS

• The World Ayahuasca Forum

Organised by the Yorenka Tasorentsi Institute, the Nixiwaka Institute, and ICEERS, the Forum billed itself as “not a conference in the usual sense” — five days of dialogue, music, dance, and visual art convened by Indigenous leaders including Benki Piyãko Ashaninka, Ninawa Pai da Mata, and Daiara Tukano, alongside researchers like Dennis McKenna and Monica Gagliano. The framing throughout was alliance: ancestral knowledge systems presented as something to be protected and learned from on their own terms, not folded into a Western wellness aesthetic.

For anyone designing spaces or programming around plant medicines, the Forum is worth studying less for its content than its structure.

Learn more here: ayahuasca2026.com

• TENSUHI, Oct 8, Polygon Portal, London, UK

Judge of the music & audio category Tensuhi is back at Polygon Portal, bringing one of the most potent vocal practices into an extraordinary 360° spatial audio environment in the heart of Soho, London. Rooted in Japanese temple traditions, they will combine the power of the human voice with immersive, transcendental sound that moves around and through the body.

London people - you don’t wanna miss this. Reserve your spot here: polygon-productions.live/portal/wellness/elemental-resonance-live

• The ALPS Conference, Oct 9–10 | Aarau, Switzerland

Switzerland’s largest conference on evidence-based psychedelic science and mental health brings researchers, clinicians, and students together for two days of talks, panel discussions, and research — preceded by multilingual professional workshops. And we are excited to be a partner this year!

Programme & tickets: alpsconference.com

• States of Consciousness: Psychedelic Discovery and the Edge of Uncertainty Oct 14-15 | Berkeley, California, USA

States of Consciousness is a multi-day conference exploring uncertainty in the study of consciousness through the lens of psychedelic science. Hosted by the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, States of Consciousness brings together researchers and practitioners across neuroscience, philosophy, journalism, ethics, and Indigenous studies to examine how different disciplines and knowledge systems approach questions of mind, consciousness, and psychedelics.

Learn more

• Mushroom Jazz Halloween Edition, Oct 31 | Miami, USA

The godfather of downtempo Mark Farina and longtime touring partner Nutritious bring Mushroom Jazz to Miami for a 35th anniversary Halloween takeover, landing at open-air oasis ZeyZey with multi-instrumentalist Chuck Love along for the ride, spinning the funky, jazzy, blunted sound Farina invented back in the cassette-trading days, digging deep in the crates til late.

Doors swing at 6PM for the Miami Mushroom Meetup, where the myco-world’s founders, growers, and true believers gather before the beats take over, hosted by Mycopreneur, Phoenix Rising Psychedelic Speakeasy and Liquid Culture Records.

Get tickets now via zeyzeymiami.com

• Psychedelics Design 2026: Creative Biome, Nov 6-7 | Online

Two days where designers, researchers, artists, and advocates come together to explore what happens when psychedelic experience meets creative practice.

Expect honest conversations, unexpected perspectives, and a community that takes both the science and the culture seriously.

Tickets available via Eventbrite here

More information and full speaker line up here: psychedelics.design/2026-conference

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• Awards judging has closed. Finalists across all nine categories are announced October 13th — watch this space.

• Design Week magazine covered the upcoming event with a generous article this month!

• Creative Biome, our 2026 conference, is November 6–7, online via Zoom, with sessions on ritual, indigenous knowledge and design, AI and integration (including the Lucy conversation above), and the awards ceremony itself on the 7th. Every session is available on replay for a month afterward, so nothing’s missed to a time zone.

• The Huxley Club’s founding price is locked only through October 2026 — after that, the rate moves. If you’ve been meaning to join, this is the month.

• The Symbiotic Cycle of Creativity — a the design-cycle model built out of this platform’s own practice, by Alexandra Plesner, mapping the “psychedelic threshold” inside a broader ego-to-symbiotic arc has now a settled name and a home on Zenodo (CC BY 4.0). It’s also the basis of a poster that will be presented at States of Consciousness: Psychedelic Discovery and the Edge of Uncertainty, Oct 14-15, 2026 at Clark Kerr Campus Conference Center University of California.

ON OUR READING PILE

A new regular section — what we're reading, what's sitting on the table, what doesn't fit neatly into any category but belongs here anyway. More books, films, articles, and resources we've curated with care over the past year live in our free resources library.

• The Psilocybin Handbook for Women — Jennifer Chesak

Re-reading currently The Psilocybin Handbook for Women is a resource for everyone, although it features information specific to those assigned female at birth—because psychedelics may have different effects and applications across the sexes.

Order here →

• Tractor Beam

Tractor Beam is a quarterly speculative and science fiction publication dedicated to soilpunk: radical visions of hopeful futures on Earth.

Access here →

• Thunder Perfect Mind

Thunder Perfect Mind is a print-only publication devoted to the Goddess, and inspired by psychedelics.

Order here →

See you soon with the announcement of this year’s design awards finalists. ♡

Know a designer, creative director, or agency working adjacent to this space? Forward this to one person who should be reading it.

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Yayoi Kusama passed away on 14 August, aged 97. She had been having hallucinations since she was ten, and she spent nearly eighty years building containers for them. “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,” she said.

In 1977, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo that offered art therapy courses and provided Kusama with the stability needed to pursue her projects without distraction. This was a very intentional choice, an artist setting up her set and setting to work best for her.

Six days after her death, the largest single-site psilocybin brain-imaging study ever run was published in Nature. Its finding, put plainly: the “psychedelic brain does not dissolve into pure chaos but reorganises itself around whatever is happening in the room at the time of the experience. Now, Paul Schrader announced to start working on what he calls his “drug movie”. From movie influencing psychedelic experiences and journey impact to movies made to translate experiences. Culture always is a full circle.

And speaking of culture and art as therapy, this year’s online conference we will have experts and researchers such as Co-Director, UCL Centre for Consciousness Research, Christopher Timmermann, talk about ritual and Sam Bloomfield, psychotherapist and MD of PsyEdu will speak with artist Harry Pack, about art as therapy, as a deliberate method to cope and heal.

The container is hugely influencing the experience. It is a working part of it. I could not help myself but already shoot some questions to Harry Pack which you will find in this newsletter amongst news from August.

Warmly,

— Alexandra

ART & DESIGN

• Yayoi Kusama, 1929–2026

Kusama died on 14 August; her studio announced it on the 26th. The obituaries have covered the market records and the queues. The piece worth your time is Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s in The Guardian (27 August), which makes a different argument: that Kusama’s refusal to treat her mental illness as something to be hidden — or, equally, as the whole explanation for the work — cleared ground that neurodivergent and disabled artists are standing on now.

For anyone designing psychedelic space, Kusama is the most rigorous case study we have and the one least often cited as design. The Infinity Mirror Rooms were a constructed idea of altered states by an artist controlling every variable: duration, threshold, solitude, exit. Tate Modern kept extending the run and it stayed open nearly three years, because demand would not stop. People queued to spend two minutes inside one woman’s hallucinations, made safe. There is a certain curiosity to experience other realities, but we would like an escape button when things get too much. Kusama never had that button, nor did she know “this might be an eight-hour trip.”

It’s a live debate, and it has two poles — both published in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, in the same year, almost as a duel. Olson’s “The Subjective Effects of Psychedelics May Not Be Necessary for Their Enduring Therapeutic Effects,” and Yaden & Griffiths’ “The Subjective Effects of Psychedelics Are Necessary.“ Since then it’s moved from argument to products, designed to deliver the plasticity without the experience, and there’s a 2025 review titled, plainly, “Should we skip the trip?“

On seriousness and respect specifically, I would be pointing at consequence. A bounded, excitable experience is something you visit. An unbounded one is something you undergo, and the irreversibility is doing the work: you can’t leave, so you have to meet things. That’s the mechanism in every initiation rite, and it’s the thing some explicitly are trying to engineer out, maybe on the grounds that the experience is a side effect rather than the mechanism. The pharmacological debate asks whether the trip is necessary for the outcome and for some this might be help without or with less fear of the experience.

The exit is a genuine safety feature that also costs you something, and the design question is how much consequence you can preserve while keeping the door. However, Kusama’s lack of an exit wasn’t a design choice. It was an illness and art her way of coping. Either way, it got me thinking.

The Guardian

• Paul Schrader Announces Ayahuasca Film — Shooting Starts in January

Paul Schrader — at Venice this year with The Basics of Philosophy, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, and the writer of Taxi Driver — told Deadline he starts a new film in January.

Schrader plans to begin his second movie in January. He calls “The Doors Of Perception” his “drug movie,” and says it will use ayahuasca trips to blur the line between a conventional theatrical film and an immersive experience.

Deadline · The Playlist

RESEARCH

• Psilocybin reorganises the brain around context

Published in Nature on 20 August, Monash University’s PsiConnect study is the largest single-site psilocybin neuroimaging project run to date — five years, 62 healthy adults, fMRI and EEG, scanned at rest and while meditating, listening to music and watching a movie.

So, psychedelics increase entropy and scramble network boundaries – yes – but they also reorganize large-scale brain activity into structured patterns shaped by what the person is doing and experiencing. Those patterns predicted next-day shifts in mood and mindset.

“We’ve shown that the brain isn’t just descending into disorder during a psychedelic experience,” said Professor Adeel Razi. Dr Devon Stoliker added that the work “provides a neural basis for the profound feeling of continuity between self and world that participants often report, which helps to explain how the psychedelic state translates into psychological change”.

Read as a design brief: sound, image, task and environment sit inside the mechanism, not around it. None of which is a new idea — Betty Eisner, Laura Huxley and the architect Kiyoshi Izumi were arguing it in the 1950s and 60s amongst others. I wrote about them here. What’s new is that it now has an imaging dataset behind it.

The team also released the full multimodal dataset as a companion paper in Scientific Data.

Monash release · Paper in Nature · The Conversation, by the authors · Dataset in Scientific Data

BUSINESS & POLICY

FDA, hearing about training, settings and safety — 14 September

Following July’s finalised clinical trial guidance, the FDA holds a public hearing on 14 September (12:30–4:30pm ET, hybrid), with written comments open until 5 October.

FDA and our federal partners are interested in public input on the potential future therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs in supervised and supportive settings, including the following topics: (1) provider training and credentialing, (2) promotion of patient safety, (3) considerations for access, and (4) best practices for data collection and standardization.

The agency has explicitly said it is not taking comment on scheduling, legalisation or non-medical use. It’s the closest to an open door this field has had in some time.

Federal Register notice

IN CONVERSATION

Harry Pack is a multi-media artist whose fractal landscapes and ethereal figures come out of altered states and out of recovery, in roughly equal measure. He runs The Purple UFO, a roving group format where people bring a piece of their own work and the room reads it back to them.

Is art a psychedelic for you? And if so, do set, setting and integration play a role — what's your version of those in the studio?

I would say, it acts in a very similar way, in that it can be a journey through the self, or through some aspect of reality we’re trying to process. I find it very therapeutic but also uncomfortable at times. It shows me things about myself I might not have expected to learn.

I like to think of ART standing for Abstract Reality Technology — learning to use it as a tool sometimes, instead of as a practice. There are so many things it can do, and the longer you practise, the more refined you become at allowing certain influences in and releasing the things that don’t serve.

I do find setting plays a huge part in the experience. For me, being outside painting in nature is the perfect way to find inspiration and serenity, which in turn enhances the experience. I’ve spent a lot of time doing that, but also fairly isolated in my room — which doesn’t necessarily mean a bad experience. Different, definitely. Lots of factors are involved, but I’d agree there are obvious parallels.

There’s a difference between art that’s therapeutic for the maker and art made as an artist. Do you ever feel those pulling in opposite directions — and which one wins?

There’s a bit of both in what I do, but as with most things it’s a spectrum. Some people work with a more therapeutic approach and others because making art is simply in their nature. I’ve always made art and it’s the main interest I have — but I’ve always felt the therapeutic benefits too, from an early age. I wasn’t very good at communicating when I was younger, and making art gave my thoughts a sense of order.

Someone reading this is in a hard place and hears “art helped me.” What’s the honest version — what did it actually take, and what did it not fix?

When I think of how art has helped me, it’s usually something that happened while I was making the piece: the place I went to in my mind, the lessons or the things I considered along the way. But it’s also the point where you can stand in front of it afterwards and see how it interacts with you. You can change the atmosphere of a space with a piece of art. When we travel we learn new things and become another version of ourselves — the same thing seems to happen with art.

Where could someone start, if they wanted to try making things to process something?

Everyone experiences it differently, so I can only really speak for myself. I have a desire to make art as much as possible, because I like to see how the landscape evolves — a bit like going on a long walk.

Exploring different mediums is a good start. Play around with a few, see which give you the most satisfaction, and ask yourself whether the process taught you anything. I think everyone has the ability to be creative. The more we create, the more this hidden language appears and starts talking back to us. The “Hieroglyphics of the Soul”, maybe.

PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN CONFERENCE – ONLINE NOV 6-7

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• Liquid Culture presents Nutritious All Night: t Release Party

Saturday 19 September, 9pm–4am · Danger Danger, 232 Knickerbocker Ave, Brooklyn

Summer isn’t over until Nutritious says it is. The NYC-raised DJ’s DJ — Liquid Culture founder and A&R, with invitations from the Whitney Museum to Pikes Ibiza — takes over Bushwick’s Danger Danger for seven hours straight, digging deep in the crates to toast Solarmaxxing, his sun-drunk new album, which landed at No. 1 Most Added on the NACC electronic chart.

RSVP: party@liquidculturerecords.com

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ON OUR READING PILE

A new regular section — what we're reading, what's sitting on the table, what doesn't fit neatly into any category but belongs here anyway. More books, films, articles, and resources we've curated with care over the past year live in our free resources library.

• Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey — Erika Dyck

This book is a global visual history of psychedelics. What makes it useful for designers is that Dyck is tracking how plants and molecules have been pictured and how each of those cultural framings was built by someone, on purpose, for an audience.

Order here →

• The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley

Among the most profound and influential explorations of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs ever written. Huxley’s reflections remain foundational in psychedelic literature. Through mescaline and LSD, he explores vision, consciousness, and the thin veil between ecstasy and madness. This dual volume captures the sacred and the shadow of expanded awareness—a seminal work for seekers, artists, and thinkers alike.

Order here →

• My Twin the Murderer — Lindsay Kent

My Twin the Murderer is a vividly cinematic psychological thriller that uses the engine of a murder mystery to explore altered consciousness, fractured identity, sisterhood, and the modern war over perception. Set against the shadow of MKUltra, psychedelic experimentation, and today’s climate of disinformation and psychological burnout, the novel asks one central question: who owns your mind?

The book has been submitted to the Psychedelics Design Awards this year and our judges have been raving about it.

Order here →

See you in a couple of weeks with the announcement of this year’s design awards finalists. ♡

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”
Gloria Steinem

Know a designer, creative director, or agency working adjacent to this space? Forward this to one person who should be reading it.

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Tickets go from £25 to £35 on September 1st!

Buy Your Ticket

Psychedelics Design, a platform exploring the intersection of psychedelics and design, today announces the full programme for the Psychedelics Design Conference 2026 — the fifth edition of its annual online gathering, taking place 6–7 November 2026 under the theme “Creative Biome.”

Across two days, designers, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and advocates come together to explore what happens when psychedelic experience meets creative practice.

The programme is built for creatives pushing at the edges of what their practice can do, for entrepreneurs building in one of the most complex and culturally loaded industries on the planet, and for researchers, practitioners and nature activists ready to have the difficult conversations about what access means beyond productivity. Expect talks, live interviews, panels and conversations that do not happen anywhere else.

“Psychedelics Design began as one designer looking for others in the field. Five years on, this conference is where that search has landed — a room, however virtual, where neuroscientists and brand designers and mycologists and activists are actually in the same conversation,” said Alexandra Plesner, Founder & Creative Director of Psychedelics Design. “Creative Biome is our way of saying that none of this work happens in isolation. Culture, care and creativity grow in the same soil.”

PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS

Confirmed sessions include:

The Long Arc of Transformation — Rick Doblin, PhD, Founder and President of MAPS, in conversation with Zoe Wilder. Holding a future that seemed implausible and slowly bringing it into reality: the soulful dimension of a long-term mission, what the psychedelic movement shares with the creative process, and what the next chapter asks of us.

How Psychedelics Work — Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at UCSF, delivers a concise, high-impact talk on the neuroscience of psychedelics, followed by a fireside conversation with David Coveney, Publisher and Executive Editor of Design Week, bringing a design-world lens to the science. Carhart-Harris speaks ahead of his forthcoming book of the same name, publishing January 2027.

Newest research on psychedelics and creativity — Manesh Girn, PhD, on the newest research into psychedelics and creativity: what actually changes in the brain when the usual constraints on thought loosen, how much of the creative effect survives contact with evidence, and what the findings do and don’t support for people who make things for a living.

Psychedelic History — Jahan Khamsehzadeh, PhD, Author & Psychedelic Scholar, traces the full arc from ancient ritual and myth to the artists, designers and countercultural movements that shaped the modern world, and what that lineage means for the work we make today.

If Fungi Was Your Futurist — Jess Jorgensen, Founder of Sporesight, on what happens when nature’s most adaptive intelligence is applied to strategic design and future thinking.

Further sessions, panels and the full running order will be announced in the coming weeks.

Tickets

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

• Rick Doblin, PhD — Founder and President, MAPS

• Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD — Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry; Head of the Carhart-Harris Lab, University of California San Francisco

• Josh Rubin — Founder, COOL HUNTING; Creative Director, Editor and Photographer

• David Coveney — Publisher and Executive Editor, Design Week

• Zoe Wilder — Founder, Zoe Wilder Public Relations & Liquid Culture Records

• Manesh Girn, PhD — Postdoctoral Neuroscientist, UCSF; Scientific Advisor and creator of The Psychedelic Scientist

• Rayyan Zafar, PhD — Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Psychedelic Research & Neuropsychopharmacology, Imperial College London

• Jahan Khamsehzadeh, PhD — Author & Psychedelic Scholar

• Jess Jorgensen — Founder, Sporesight

• Harry Pack – Artist

• Sam Bloomfield – Psychotherapist and MD of PsyEdu

• John Biggs – Author and Entrepreneur

• Joshua White — Founder & Executive Director, Fireside Project

• Marissa Feinberg — Founder, Triple Bottom Why and PSYCA (Psychedelics for Climate Action)

• Joyce Braverman, MD — Medical Doctor; Psychedelic Therapies and Research, CIIS

• Marlena Robbins (Diné) — Doctor of Public Health candidate at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and Program Coordinator at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

• Dennis Walker — Founder, Mycopreneur & Co-Founder, Mycoday

The conference is hosted by Dennis Walker, Founder of Mycopreneur, co-produced with Floris Wolswijk, Founder of Blossom, and co-curated with Zoe Wilder, founder Zoe Wilder PR and co-founder Liquid Culture Records. Additional speakers are to be announced.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Thanks to the generous support of our key partners COOL HUNTING, Design Week, Psychedelics Today, Liquid Culture Records, Nutritious, Blossom, Mycopreneur and MAPS.

Welcome to Psychedelics Design – where design meets psychedelics!

Nutritious — artist, DJ, producer, founder of Liquid Culture Records, founding team member of DoubleBlind Magazine, and the composer of this podcast’s theme — has spent more than two decades reading rooms for a living. The Whitney Museum. Pikes Ibiza. Rodarte at New York Fashion Week. All-night, all-vinyl residencies in the East Village. Three or four turntables treated like live instruments.

Which makes him the right person to answer a question we don’t ask enough. We talk endlessly about how music shapes set and setting. This episode turns it around: how does the setting shape the music?

Key Themes Explored

1. The Room Is a Collaborator, Not a Backdrop Architecture, acoustics, crowd, current events — Nutritious reads all of it before choosing a single record. Set and setting runs in both directions.

2. Resonance Over Signature Nutritious is not after a recognisable sound per se. The question he asks of every track is whether the frequency resonates and whether making it left him feeling whole — not whether it sounds like him.

3. Build the Container You Wish Had Existed Liquid Culture grew directly out of losing his brother to the stigma facing creatives. Support, community and visibility as infrastructure, not sentiment.

4. The Disciplines Were Never Meant to Be Separate Music, ritual, architecture, medicine and community were one way of life for millennia. The current work is repair — creating the map and refining the language handed to us.

5. Psychedelic vs. Psychedelic-Adjacent — and Why the Hierarchy Is a Trap There’s a real difference between mimicry and channelling. But non-psychedelic work can matter just as much to this movement, and gatekeeping by taste does the field a disservice.

6. Devotion as the Through-Line What he’s hoping to see in the Awards submissions isn’t polish. “I’m excited to see the devotional process that creators bring to their projects.”

Find Nutritious on:
djnutritious.com • Instagram • SoundCloud • Liquid Culture

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Liquid Culture is a record label and artist collective redefining the intersection of music, visual art, and cultural innovation. More than a label, it’s a movement — empowering musicians, visual artists and creators to push boundaries, collaborate freely, and shape the future of sound and expression. liquidculturerecords.com

DoubleBlind Magazine, the biannual print magazine and media company covering psychedelics, mental health and cultural transformation. Nutritious was a member of the founding team — and our recent conversation with co-founders Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin makes a natural companion listen. doubleblindmag.com

The Psychedelics Design Awards 2026: Nine categories, international judging panel, student scholarships available. Nutritious is judging Music & Sound. psychedelics.design/awards

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We talk constantly about set and setting — about how music shapes a room and the people inside it. I wanted to ask the question the other way round. How does the room shape the music?

Nutritious was the right person to ask. He has played the Whitney Museum, Pikes Ibiza, Rodarte at New York Fashion Week; he has toured internationally with Mark Farina; he treats three or four turntables like live instruments. He was also a member of the founding team at DoubleBlind, which makes this conversation a kind of companion piece to the one we ran with Shelby and Madison. And he co-founded Liquid Culture, a record label and artist collective that turns out to have a far more personal origin than I understood before we sat down.

He is also a judge in this year’s Psychedelics Design Awards, and — as of this season — the composer of this podcast’s theme.

I should say that this question isn’t a neutral one for me. I have spent most of my life without a place to belong: driven, restless, often melancholic, and maybe here to admit today, finding it hard to be here at all. The times that lifted were hardly because something shifted inside me. They were because I was in the right room. My cohort at Central Saint Martins. The creative studio Method Inc London, under the leadership it had then. Another creative studio, Normally Ltd, also in London. And now I seem to find similar in the team at the Carhart-Harris Lab, even though we are hardly in the same room, yet alone country. Every piece of work I am actually proud of came out of one of those rooms.

So when Nutritious describes building Liquid Culture as a container for artists who were never given one, I didn’t hear a company origin story. I heard the thing that has somewhat determined the shape of my entire working life. It also reached me somewhere closer than that. The past years have taught me once more, how thin the line can be.

Which is perhaps what set and setting has always meant, underneath the clinical usage: not only the room you take something in, more the room you are permitted to become yourself in.

What stayed with me otherwise is how completely he refuses the separation between disciplines: that the split between music, ritual, architecture and community is the recent anomaly, and the work now is repair.

3 WEEKS LEFT

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Get your ticket for the 2 day online conference and join us at our 5th event with speakers at the intersection of science, psychedelics, creativity and design culture.

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The Interview

On how the room plays back

I asked whether context changes what he plays, and how. For him, the environment isn’t a backdrop to the performance, it’s a participant in it.

“The environment is really everything.”

Architecture, acoustics, who is in the room that day, the mood the audience arrived in, what is happening in the world outside — all of it, he says, sets the table before a single note drops. Approaching a place like the Whitney from the street, walking inside, hearing how sound ricochets off the walls: that reconnaissance shapes the set.

There are two ways to walk into a room. You can arrive with a fixed point of view and impress it on the space. He doesn’t work that way.

“What is the vibe of the moment? Maybe people need to loosen up a bit. Or maybe you’re coming into a situation where the energy is really scattered and it needs something to help get people unified.”

The audience, he’s clear, shouldn’t have to think about any of this. “You want them free of spirit and free of mind so they can just enjoy themselves.” The reading is his job. And at festivals, where some portion of the room is in an altered state, that job carries a weight worth pausing and sitting with.

On why he isn't chasing a signature sound

Nutritious’ work is recognisable — you know a Nutritious track when you hear one. He was generous about it, and then gently dismantled the premise.

“I don’t even know that I would know exactly how to do that. It is a journey.”

His references run from classical and jazz through UK garage, drum and bass, house, electronic. But the thing he holds onto is a lot about resonance.

“What I do know: I want the frequency of what I create to resonate. That’s what I hold dearest. Making something that speaks to me and makes me feel whole as I create it.”

The visual side, he’s careful to add, is a collective effort. Album covers, campaign rollouts, the whole visual language around the music comes out of the Liquid Culture community. “I don’t think I could ever do it entirely on my own, nor would I want to.”

On Liquid Culture — and the loss that started it

This is the part of the conversation I did not see coming, and the part I have thought about most since.

Liquid Culture began, he says, with the death of his older brother. A virtuoso string player — violin first, then electric guitar — coming up in the mid-to-late seventies on Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, jazz, classical. More than a decade older, and thrilled, when Nutritious was born, to have someone to make things with. He would sit down his little brother at a Fisher Price drum kit as a toddler and would be jamming with him.

Nutritious’ brother struggled for years. And the stigma around creative people who experimented, in an era long before any destigmatisation of psychedelics, was part of what closed the doors.

“I think that hung over his head in a way that made him feel lost as an artist. And like there was really no viable path to express his point of view and have a real trajectory.”

He took his own life.

“On the other side of that, learning to grieve through the process, really understanding what it was that made him feel that way. We built Liquid Culture so artists are supported. So they know there’s a community that sees their value, sees their ideas, and helps them see it through. Being an artist shouldn’t be a stigmatized path.”

That is the foundation of Liquid Culture. To have a container built in response to the absence of one.

On why the disciplines were never meant to be separate

The conversation opened out from there into something bigger. Nutritious reads the current moment as a repair job rather than an invention.

“Way before our time, millennia ago, they were [not] quite so bifurcated and separate lanes.”

Community, ritual, ceremony, plant medicine, architecture, music, dance — even governance. In many ancient cultures these were one continuous way of life, and there are communities today still using plant medicine as a way of reasoning together about the direction of the whole.

“Humans create. Design. Architecture. Music. Governance. Somewhere we got off the beaten track. These things are meant to be built together,
by community, appreciated as one.”

He is also unsentimental about the sixties. The counterculture, he says, was exactly what it needed to be — and then it was used as a political pawn to push through a set of countering laws and restrictions, which left this generation having to build a new counterculture from scratch. The hope is that the pendulum stops swinging.

“What we can do is try our hardest to create the map as best as we can, and create a language — and help refine and keep developing the language that was handed to us.”

On nature as the ultimate psychedelic

When he writes, he sees rather than hears first.

“I can see it in my mind. I see scenes. I see pictures almost the same way we watch a movie.”

It’s why he moved into film scoring. Every song starts as a place you could move through. He draws on psychedelic journeys for this, and just as much on ordinary ones — a walk, weather, light.

“Nature is the ultimate psychedelic. Especially the sun.”

Which leads to his diagnosis of why the field feels so scattered right now. The differing needs, approaches and mindsets around these medicines come, he thinks, from a culture that hasn’t yet understood its own relationship to nature — beyond the plants and compounds — the cosmos, the sun, air, water, energy. Someone working with medicine in a city, disconnected from all of that, is having a fundamentally different experience from someone in the jungle. Much of what’s happening now is people peeling back that layer.

On psychedelic work versus psychedelic-adjacent work

I asked him where the line falls. His answer complicated the question in the best way.

Yes, there’s a distinction. Psychedelic-adjacent work tends to look more corporate, more mainstream — “something that’s tacked on and is a mimicry.” Work that actually carries the spirit is “a channeling of the experience,” and if you’ve been there, you can feel it immediately.

But he won’t turn that distinction into a hierarchy of value.

“Work that isn't psychedelic can be just as vital to this movement. Carrying the message of connection. With each other. With our world.”

And more than that — nobody has cracked it. “I’m not sure that there’s any creator or artist who’s been able to do a job and say, this is what the psychedelic experience is. And that’s okay. I think that’s important. We can lay the map, we can show people design, we can create fantastic works of art, but you have to experience it for yourself to really feel it.”

His warning is against gatekeeping by taste. People arrive at all of this from wildly different places, and writing something off because it doesn’t speak to one particular relationship with psychedelics does the whole field a disservice.

On judging the Awards

I asked why he said yes to something this niche.

“It was an easy yes.”

His reasoning: design is the mechanism by which humans bring interior things into the world, and we live in an entirely designed world as a result. A platform that gathers creatives working with that kind of intentionality is, in his view, straightforwardly needed. Naturally, this had me stop and ponder.

What is he hoping to see in the submissions? He’s deliberately open — the surprise is the point — but there is one word he keeps returning to.

“If there’s a through line, it’s devotion. I’m excited to see the devotional process that creators bring to their projects.”

On what’s next

I asked what he’d still love to score. A museum show, it turns out — but not a conventional one.

“Can we put a museum show together where we’re fusing the great psychedelic works of the past with the great modern psychedelics today, the artists in the Liquid Culture community, the Psychedelics Design community — and really show people how this all works together, and why we’re all here doing this in the first place?”

Consider this an open call. We are absolutely on it!

Find Nutritious on:
djnutritious.com • Instagram • SoundCloud • Liquid Culture

🎙️ PODCAST

This interview was recorded as part of the Psychedelics Design podcast. Listen to the full conversation → Psy*Design Podcast

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• New Media Partners for this year’s conference!

States of Mind is a new kind of media platform combining original video, podcasts, journalism, and personal stories of healing and growth. Expert insight meets practical tools, for people trying to make sense of psychedelics at every stage of their journey. We love the range.

Lucy’s Magazine is the leading European platform for psychoactive news, research, and culture — offering informed, independent coverage of the ongoing psychedelic renaissance. Published by Nachtschatten Verlag, the Swiss publisher that has quietly been one of the most important archives of psychedelic literature and science since 1980s, Lucy’s carries a lineage. They are a fundamental part of the European infrastructure that kept the conversation alive when the mainstream had moved on. We are therefor really proud to be in their orbit.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• PSYCA: Climate, Consciousness & Mental Health Summit, New York, September

How can we look within to transform our outer worlds—and is collective healing, rooted in embodied action, the answer?

Sept. 17, 2025, 5-10pm

Learn more here → psyca.org/ccmh

• ALPS Conference 2026, Switzerland, October

The Awareness Lectures on Psychedelics in Switzerland (ALPS) 2026 conference is a gathering for those working at the intersection of psychedelic science and medicine. Held at the Kultur & Kongresshaus Aarau, the event is hosted by the ALPS Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting rigorous and evidence-based psychedelic programming. The conference attracts a multidisciplinary audience, including psychiatrists, psychologists, and biologists, as well as students and researchers from across Europe.

October 8, 2026–October 9, 2026

Learn more here → alps.foundation/alps-events/alps-conference

ON OUR READING PILE

A new regular section — what we’re reading, what’s sitting on the table, what doesn’t fit neatly into any category but belongs here anyway. More books, films, articles, and resources we’ve curated with care over the past year live in our free resources library.

“Should we do it at all?” — David Johnston, Accept & Proceed — via Creative Boom (not psychedelics)

Accept & Proceed founder David Johnston spent twenty years mastering the mechanics of desire. Now his framework Signalism asks what that mastery actually costs — and proposes that designers start every project with a question the industry almost never asks: should we do it at all?

It’s the right question for this field too. In a space where aesthetics, healing, and commerce are increasingly entangled, the capacity to pause and ask what realities our signals are creating should not come as optional. It is essentially the whole discipline of the future. creativeboom.com →

• Elastic Magazine Issue 2: The Interspecies Issue

The second issue of the print magazine of psychedelic art and literature — themed around connections intimate, hostile, symbiotic, and psychic between humans, animals, plants, fungi, and other lifeforms — is now available. Issue 1 was a Psychedelics Design Award 2025 finalist for storytelling. Founded by Hillary Brenhouse, designed by Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields. elasticmag.com →

“That’s the good thing about music — you can’t quite define why it works, but you know when it does.”

– Jarvis Cocker

There is a version of this moment that is easy to celebrate. Eli Lilly just paid $3.8 billion for a psychedelic drug company. The FDA published its first-ever clinical trial guidance for psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA. Compass Pathways reported the durability data it needed to complete its New Drug Application. Definium’s LSD stock doubled. Our partner Nutritious released an album that sounds like what the inside of a good day feels like. Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley gave the opening keynote at ICPR on women’s psychedelic biology — and is building the first standardised framework for collecting women’s psychedelic data, a topic she was told was niche four years ago. And the speakers for our November conference are coming together, co-curated with Zoe Wilder. For the entire month of August, tickets are £25 / $33 — rising to £35 in September and £50 in October. Get your ticket →

These events don’t belong to the same story. But they happened in the same month — and for a field that spent decades on the margins, the simultaneity is worth sitting with. Something has tipped. The question the next few months will answer is: in whose image, and for whom?

— Alexandra

MUSIC

• Nutritious reveals six-track deep ‘Nu’ house mini-album ‘Solarmaxxing’

Visionary DJ/producer and cultural alchemist Nutritious – who is also a judge of this year’s Psychedelics Design Awards – lets in the light on his stunning new body of work; his six-song mini-album ‘Solarmaxxing’ turns everything toward the sun, glorious ‘Nu-house’ meant for open air, proper sound systems, all-night rooms… Out July 31^st on his own Liquid Culture Records.

‘’Solarmaxxing’ turns everything toward the sun and holds it there - heat, rhythm, and motion with the intensity of a living star. A record that squeezes the electricity of a juicy day and keeps it flowing past dark - golden dawns, neon sunsets, salt on skin - sugar for the soul.’ Nutritious

A true DJ’s DJ, Nutritious, self-taught on cassette & vinyl, blends cosmic disco, deep house, nu-disco, indie dance, and techno in high-energy sets. Meticulously curated and thrillingly spontaneous, he treats his 3-4 turntables like live instruments - improvising remixes in real time, threading rare edits and unique deep cuts. Shows include Pikes Ibiza, Art Basel, Zey Zey Miami, Cielo NYC, Mighty SF, Pacha NYC, The Whitney Museum supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation, Rodarte for New York Fashion Week, international Mushroom Jazz shows with Mark Farina…

Save the album HERE.

Spotify | Instagram | Website | Bandcamp

BUSINESS & CULTURE

• Eli Lilly Acquires AtaiBeckley for Up to $3.8 Billion — The Largest Psychedelic Deal in History

On July 16, Eli Lilly agreed to acquire AtaiBeckley — the company formed from the 2025 merger of atai Life Sciences and Beckley Psytech — for $2.8 billion upfront plus up to $1 billion in milestone-based payments, valuing the deal at up to $3.8 billion. It is the largest psychedelic transaction in pharmaceutical history, surpassing AbbVie’s acquisition of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals’ lead compound for up to $1.2 billion last year, and Otsuka’s $700 million acquisition of Transcend Therapeutics.

Lilly’s prize is BPL-003, AtaiBeckley’s DMT-based nasal spray currently in Phase 3 trials for treatment-resistant depression, with initial results expected in early 2029. Jefferies estimates BPL-003 could generate $1–2 billion in annual sales if trials succeed. The deal also gives Lilly access to AtaiBeckley’s MDMA-adjacent program and a broader pipeline of tryptamine and phenethylamine candidates.

CNBC · BioPharma Dive · Bloomberg · Forbes

• FDA Finalises Psychedelic Clinical Trial Guidance — and Announces a September Public Hearing

On July 14, the FDA published its first-ever final guidance on clinical trial design for psychedelic drugs — covering psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and related compounds. The document formally addresses the “functional unblinding” problem that contributed to the 2024 rejection of Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA application: that participants almost always know whether they took a psychedelic, complicating data interpretation. The FDA’s solution requires active placebos, blinding questionnaires, and a complementary dose-response design using no placebo at all. Each session must be monitored in full by two trained observers. Pleasurable psychedelic effects must be recorded as adverse events.

In the same notice, the FDA announced a public hearing for September 14 — a signal the agency is building infrastructure for what may soon be a live approval docket. Compass Pathways holds a Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher, meaning its NDA will receive an expedited 1–2 month review after full submission, targeted for Q4 2026.

Federal Register · Clinical Trials Arena · BioSpace

• The Pipeline in July — Compass, Definium, and the First Approvals in Sight

July delivered the clinical data the field has been waiting for. Compass Pathways reported positive 26-week Part B durability results from COMP006 on July 7 — the final dataset needed to complete its rolling NDA. 39% of participants in the 25 mg psilocybin arm maintained clinically meaningful MADRS reduction at Week 6, with benefit sustained on average through Week 26; nearly 30% of Week-6 responders reached remission following retreatment. A US launch in H1 2027 is now the stated target, subject to FDA approval and DEA rescheduling.

Definium Therapeutics’ Phase 3 Emerge trial of DT120 — its oral LSD candidate for MDD — returned positive results in late June, with an 8.1-point MADRS improvement described by Jefferies analyst Andrew Tsai as delivering “the largest effect size I’ve ever seen.” Definium shares rose 97% over the month. A GAD Phase 3 readout is expected in Q3 2026.

BioSpace · Psychedelic Alpha

RESEARCH

• One Dose of Psilocybin Changes the Brain for Up to a Month — the Mechanism Is Insight

A study published in Nature Communications by researchers at UCSF and Imperial College London — co-authored by Manesh Girn and Robin Carhart-Harris — found that a single high dose of psilocybin produces measurable changes in both brain activity and brain structure detectable up to a month later, in healthy adults who had never previously used a psychedelic. Within 60 minutes of taking a 25 mg dose, EEG recordings showed a sharp spike in brain entropy — the variety and complexity of neural activity. Participants who experienced the largest increases in entropy were most likely to report greater emotional insight the following day, and that insight predicted improved wellbeing a month later.

Diffusion tensor imaging conducted one month after the dose revealed structural changes in prefrontal-subcortical white matter tracts — suggesting the brain’s physical wiring may be altered, not just its activity patterns. For designers and creative practitioners, the implication is a question about whether a single experience can physically alter the architecture through which you perceive and think.

UCSF · Carhart-Harris Lab · Nature Communications, May 2026

• Beyond the Biological Baseline: Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley on Developing Female-Inclusive Psychedelic Frameworks

Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley, neuroscientist and founder of Hystelica, opened ICPR in Haarlem with the conference’s first keynote on women’s psychedelic health. Her argument is mechanistic: oestrogen directly affects serotonin production, metabolism, and 5-HT2A receptor density — the same receptor psychedelics act on. Dosing women without accounting for where they are in their menstrual cycle risks amplifying the wrong internal states entirely.

Hystelica’s first female-focused psychedelic survey found improvements in menstrual-cycle symptoms — anxiety, mood, cognitive functioning, and pain — with greater effects among women with PMDD. Some women reported cycles returning after high-dose experiences following stress-related cessation, and improved regularity in PCOS, suggesting possible HPA-axis re-regulation worth studying. Next up: a Delphi study with fifty-plus experts to build the first standardised framework for collecting women’s psychedelic data. None of it currently exists.

Psychedelic Alpha, July 30, 2026 · Hystelica is a Psychedelics Design partner — their brand identity was created by Alexandra Plesner, founder Psychedelics Design.

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• Psychedelics Design Conference — First Speakers Announced

The 2026 Psychedelics Design Conference goes online this November, themed Creative Biome — exploring psychedelics and creativity as living forces shaping culture, care, and future possibility.

The first speakers are confirmed: Rick Doblin (MAPS) in conversation with Zoe Wilder on "The Long Arc of Transformation"; Robin Carhart-Harris (UCSF) on "How Psychedelics Work," speaking ahead of his forthcoming January 2027 book, in fireside conversation with Design Week's David Coveney; COOL HUNTING’s Josh Rubin, Jahan Khamsehzadeh on psychedelic history and creativity; Jess Jorgensen on fungi as a model for strategic design; plus Manesh Girn, Dennis Walker, Joshua White, Rayyan Zafar, and more to be announced.

Get tickets for only £25 until September 1st →

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• The 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness — Professional Certificate Training

The Institute of Applied Metaprogramming has launched a self-paced professional training built around the 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness — the framework originally developed by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, now updated for applied psychedelic practice by Dr. Rachel Turetzky and Dr. Douglas Wingate. The course covers all eight circuits from somatic safety through to ego dissolution and non-dual awareness, with specific application to psychedelic preparation, facilitation, and integration. It’s designed for clinicians, facilitators, coaches, and serious students — and carries 13 CE credits for eligible mental health professionals. Earn the Certified Metaprogrammer credential (CMPr) on completion. Early bird pricing of $1,499 (down from $1,999) runs until August 15 with code 8CM-PROMO.
Explore the course →

• Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics — New York City, October 15–17

Horizons returns to New York this October — the longest-running psychedelic conference in the world, bringing together leaders across science, medicine, policy, business, culture, and spirituality. It was the second psychedelic conference we ever attended, and it genuinely shaped how I think about this ecosystem. If you haven't been, this is one to start with. horizonsconference.org →

• Vital Conference — Breckenridge, Colorado, November 7–10

A more intimate gathering for practitioners, clinicians, facilitators, educators, and Vital alumni — people actively shaping the future of psychedelic care and community. Hosted by Psychedelics Today in the mountains of Colorado. Tickets →

ON OUR READING PILE

A new regular section — what we're reading, what's sitting on the table, what doesn't fit neatly into any category but belongs here anyway. More books, films, articles, and resources we've curated with care over the past year live in our free resources library.

• Elastic Magazine Issue 2: The Interspecies Issue

The second issue of the print magazine of psychedelic art and literature — themed around connections intimate, hostile, symbiotic, and psychic between humans, animals, plants, fungi, and other lifeforms — is now available. Issue 1 was a Psychedelics Design Award 2025 finalist for storytelling. Founded by Hillary Brenhouse, designed by Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields. elasticmag.com →

• Microdosing for Health and Healing — Dr. James Fadiman, Jordan Gruber

An insightful, no-fluff guide to microdosing—where research meets lived experience. Blending science, cultural context, and personal stories, it explores how small doses can support clarity, mood, creativity, and gentle shifts in daily life. Clear, grounded, and human-centered, it’s for anyone curious about unlocking subtle change without the hype.

Order here →

• The Psilocybin Connection — Jahan Khamsehzadeh PhD

An expansive, mind-stretching exploration of psilocybin’s role in shaping human consciousness—past, present, and future. Merging science, anthropology, and personal insight, it proposes that magic mushrooms didn’t just alter minds, they helped evolve them. Bold, original, and deeply informed, this is a visionary synthesis for anyone curious about how psychedelics could help rewire not just individuals, but culture itself.

psychedelicevolution.org →

That's the July roundup. See you soon with another interview and podcast — we spoke with another judges this month, and hope to keep inspiring people to explore the questions that sit at the heart of everything we do here: what can psychedelics do for design, and what can design do for psychedelics. ♡

Know a designer, creative director, or agency working adjacent to this space? Forward this to one person who should be reading it.

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Some conversations arrive at exactly the right moment. Jess Jorgensen is the Foundress of Sporesight — a futures design practice that uses fungal intelligence as both metaphor and methodology for strategic imagination. She thinks in ecosystems, in timescales, in decomposition – we speak the same language as designers. She is also one of the sharpest thinkers I’ve encountered on what it actually means to design for the future rather than just predict it.

What drew me to this conversation was the seriousness with which Jess treats the non-human world as a source of intelligence — as an actual operational logic. Mycelium as a strategic framework. Rot as a methodology. The 8,500-year-old fungus in Oregon as a planning horizon.

The psychedelic connection is biological and philosophical: fungi gave us psilocybin, and the distributed intelligence of mycelial networks structurally mirrors what expanded states produce in the brain. Jess asks what it might mean to design systems — organisations, cities, cultures — that operate on fungal logic rather than extractive ones.

And here is the thing that stays with you after you sit with this work long enough: we are not separate from any of it. Our bodies already carry fungi. We are already part of the network. And one day, we too will decompose — returning what we borrowed back to the substrate that made us. That is not a morbid thought. It is perhaps the most clarifying one available to us right now.

This is an interview with Jess about decomposition, regeneration, and why we need to stop building new chairs.

Jess joins us as a judge of the 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards — and we are thrilled to have her. She will also be delivering a keynote at our online conference this November, explaining her methodology in detail. Consider this a warm-up.

The Interview

On thinking like fungi

For Jess, fungi offer a principle 400 million years in the making: rot before you regenerate. Deliquescence first — letting go of what isn’t serving. Then composting: breaking those elements into nourishment for what comes next. Nothing wasted; everything metabolised. “Only from that substrate does something genuinely new emerge.”

This isn’t just metaphor. It’s a methodology she applies to imagination work, strategic foresight, futures design, innovation, and brand — to shift organisations from extractive to regenerative. The method scales: at Future Days in Copenhagen, she and a group of colleagues half-jokingly discussed decomposing the nation state. “So, thinking like fungi means acquiring sporesight: the ability to see, imagine and design regenerative futures.” And we love this!

On mycelial networks versus hierarchies

Hierarchies are extraordinarily bad at sensing weak signals at the edges — and that’s precisely where disruption originates. Conventional foresight puts observers outside the system. AI accelerates analysis but widens the gap further: “lacking culture, emotion, and nuance, it’s closer to a spreadsheet than a being, totally disembodied from the ecosystems it analyses.”

Mycelial networks operate differently. No headquarters. No top-down instruction. Just live, fluid sensing and response, sharing information laterally and allocating resources in real time. For organisations, this means embedded frontline staff — those already sensing constantly — being given frameworks to interpret signals and permission to act on them. “Fungi show us how signal sensing can be truly alive: decentralised, embodied, and responsive as things change.”

On translating fungal logic into strategy

Jess works with three intelligences simultaneously: foresight, AI, and fungal logic. Foresight interprets signals and imagines preferable futures. AI detects patterns at speed. Fungi provide what both lack — “holding multiple pathways simultaneously, decomposing what’s dead, emerging into conditions rather than predicting them.”

She’s careful about metaphor, though. The “Wood Wide Web” is the classic trap — implying mycelial networks are purely mutualistic, sharing and caring in perfect harmony. “The reality is richer and stranger: fungi share and deny, cooperate and compete, nurture and predate. Symbiosis is not all happy vibes.” The translation has to be scientifically grounded, developed with both scientists and strategists in the room.

The practical output is simple: map your system, identify what needs to decompose, find the nourishment in the waste, recompose from what’s left.

On what her global research tour changed

She went in assuming expertise looked like credentials. She came out thinking differently. Across more than 100 interviews, “the most generative conversations were with growers, healers, farmers, bedroom activists, and citizen scientists — people whose knowledge is embodied and site-specific rather than published and peer-reviewed.”

A mycologist in a lab tells you how a species behaves in controlled conditions. A forager who has walked the same forest floor for forty years tells you how it behaves in this soil, this season, after this weather. Bioregional knowledge carries an intelligence that globalised, abstracted expertise cannot replicate. “We’ve systematically devalued it, and we’re paying for that in our capacity to respond to localised ecological crises.” The most exciting mycoculture, she found, happens outside algorithmic and academic clutches — decentralised, subversive, alive across food systems, wellbeing, art, and soil.

On what regenerative design feels like when it's done well

“Regenerative” risks becoming what “sustainable” became: a reputational veneer on business-as-usual. Jess is direct about this. As Jenny Andersson observes in Global headwinds and the regenerative field (1), organisations label themselves ‘regen’ as a buzzword, without the multidisciplinary wisdom it actually takes. There are structural arguments that truly regenerative organisations can't exist within capitalism, as regenerative processes operate on biological timescales that don't conform to quarterly reporting.

Where she sees genuine embodiment is in place-based bio-hubs: farms, campuses, community centres built from the ground up around bioregional logic, with local ecosystems as primary stakeholders. Not retrofitted regeneration; a different root system entirely. Think Lo-TEK: local traditional ecological knowledge, as explained by the Lo-TEK Institute.

In her Decomposition Day sessions, there’s usually a moment she recognises as the real beginning: “someone says something they’ve never said in a meeting room: an admission about what they’ve been pretending is fine but isn’t. That’s the rot beginning. So, regenerative design done well feels less like a methodology and more like a metabolic process: something releases, something else becomes possible.”

On moving from extractive to regenerative without it becoming symbolic

Sporesight starts with decomposition. They identify what the organisation is extracting — from its people, its supply chains, its ecosystems — that it cannot sustain. That question, taken seriously, produces a very different kind of strategic document than a sustainability report.

The shift from symbolic to legitimate happens at one specific moment: “when leadership is willing to name — publicly and specifically — what needs to rot. That takes courage, and is where genuine regeneration begins.”

On the connection between mycelium and expanded states of consciousness

The connection is both metaphorical and biological. Psilocybin temporarily disrupts the brain’s Default Mode Network — the system responsible for our habitual sense of self and fixed narratives. Research from Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London shows this correlates with increased neural connectivity across regions that don’t normally communicate: “a pattern structurally similar to mycelial networks.”

Both psilocybin and mycelium dissolve rigid boundaries and reveal unexpected connections. “What’s interesting strategically is that most extractive thinking is maintained by precisely the cognitive rigidity that psychedelic research suggests expanded states can loosen. The clinical evidence is compelling. The question is whether we’re courageous enough to apply that underlying logic to how we design systems.”

On time, and thinking in ecological horizons

Conventional strategic planning operates on one-to-three year horizons. Fungi operate differently. The humungous fungus — Armillaria ostoyae — in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest is an estimated 8,500 years old, covering 2,385 acres. It got there by persisting, adapting, and constantly decomposing. Not optimising for quarterly growth.

Jess’s foresight work deliberately stretches time perception, asking organisations to hold multiple timescales simultaneously: the urgent present, the medium-term transition, the longer ecological arc. “What looks like disruption in a three-year horizon often looks like necessary composting in a thirty-year one.”

On what a fungal future looks like for design

In Sporesight’s preferred future, design is life-centric rather than human-centric. At their Future Days Copenhagen side event — Growing the Decomposition Economy — thirty futures thinkers decomposed four systems of death. One speculative dispatch, inspired by Orange Peel Fungus applied to the Body Economy, imagined 2030: human composting displacing burial and cremation in global cities; urban composting facilities attached to community gardens becoming sites of civic meaning; ancestry made literal and earth-edible.

“This isn’t pure speculation. Human composting has been legally available in several US states since 2019. Mycelium burial suits have moved from design concept to mainstream option. A fungal future for design is already composting into existence.” On the culture we’re collectively building

“I believe that we’re designing a culture of community care, rooted in compassion and harm reduction.” And embedded in that is a longer reckoning: the War on Drugs has left lasting damage on communities. Restorative justice isn’t optional — it’s foundational. The field’s future has to be built on ethics and safety, or it will repeat the patterns it claims to be moving beyond.

On the one principle designers should adopt from nature immediately

Decompose before you recompose. Stop asking what we can create next. Start asking what needs to rot first.

“The design industry is addicted to newness. Decomposition should be a non-negotiable phase. What assumptions does this project inherit that need to compost? What things, materials or systems don’t need to be built anew, but can be recomposed from what already exists?”

She leaves us with this: during 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, a furniture designer who’d seen her work said — “We don’t need more fucking chairs. I’m going to decompose my company.”

Read more

Jess’s playbook Fungi as your Futurist maps ten design principles from fungal intelligence for organisations ready to decompose and recompose.

Check out Sporesight, a way of thinking inspired by fungi.

She’s also a member of RADAR — a decentralised community practising mycelial signal-sensing in real time.

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• Tickets for the 2026 Conference are now on sale!
Mark your calendars: 6–7 November, online. This year’s theme, Creative Biome, explores the shared ecosystem of psychedelics and creativity as living forces shaping culture, care, and what comes next.

On the lineup so far: Rick Doblin (MAPS), Robin Carhart-Harris presenting ahead of his forthcoming book How Psychedelics Work, Josh Rubin (COOL HUNTING), Jess Jorgensen (Sporesight), Zoe Wilder, and more to be announced.

Tickets from £10 → Get yours here
More information here → psychedelics.design/2026-conference

ON OUR READING PILE

A new regular section — what we’re reading, what’s sitting on the table, what doesn’t fit neatly into any category but belongs here anyway. More books, films, articles, and resources we’ve curated with care over the past year live in our free resources library.

How Psychedelics Work: The Hidden Mind and Our Power to Heal by Robin Carhart-Harris (Scribner, out Feb 23, 2027) — now open for pre-order.

A personal note on this one: I did the original design concept for the cover, ultimately brought to life by the publisher’s in-house design team — and getting to see it out in the world is honestly one of the honours of this year for me.

But set that aside for a second, because the book itself is the real story. Robin distills decades of research — including his own landmark clinical trials — into a genuinely new model of mental health, where beliefs and narratives calcify until they stop bending. It’s rare to see someone this deep in the science write with this much clarity about consciousness, healing, and what a psychedelic experience actually does to a mind.

I’ve read it. I pre-ordered my copies. It’s a must-buy — pre-order it now: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-Psychedelics-Work/Robin-Carhart-Harris/9781668063286

FROM OUR PARTNER

As psychedelic practice continues to expand across Europe, there is a growing need for training that goes beyond theory. The Mirari Foundation Programme is a 12-week interdisciplinary introduction to psychedelic studies and practice, designed for clinicians, coaches, guides, researchers, educators, and anyone seeking a rigorous, evidence-informed foundation.

Led by Programme Director David Drapkin, LCSW, MSW, with curriculum consultants Alex Belser, Max Wolff and Yannick Jacob, the programme draws on an interdisciplinary faculty that includes guest instructors Rayan Safar, Erica Zelfand and Sergio Perez. Through live teaching, practical skills labs, peer learning, and reflective practice, students develop the judgment, ethical grounding, and relational skills needed to navigate this evolving field with confidence.

Applications are now open for the cohort beginning on 30 September.
Enrol by 30 July to receive a 25% Early Bird discount.

Apply for the program today.

June has been a month of quiet consolidation — and some very significant science.

The awards submissions are now closed. Our jury is doing what juries do best: looking closely, thinking carefully, sitting with the work. We’ll be sharing finalists in the autumn, and winners will be celebrated live at the conference in November.

None of this would have been possible without the people who submitted their work, the partners who amplified the call, and the judges who gave their time and expertise. Thank you — genuinely. Every submission was a small act of courage: a decision to say, this work matters, and I want it seen. We think so too.

To our jury and partners: you make this possible, and we are grateful.

While the field debates policy and the pharma deals get bigger, creatives keep doing what they've always done — integrating the experience, translating the untranslatable, making something that didn't exist before. This issue is honouring that.

MUSIC

• East Forest: "Nature (Gathered)" — Human Co-Creation as Antidote

The second single from East Forest’s forthcoming album The Invitation, As We Gathered (out 10 July) dropped on 17 June. “Nature (Gathered)” features Kishi Bashi and, in his posthumous presence through recorded teachings, Ram Dass. The track was performed live and unfolded in real time — an improvisation that found its form in a real moment.

East Forest’s own framing of the album is one of the more honest things we’ve read this month: “Every track was performed and recorded live, around the world, as we gathered. Human connection and co-creation feel like an antidote to the digital and AI uprising around us.”

It is a quietly radical artistic statement for 2026, rooted in the irreducible quality of human creation, presence, of bodies and voices doing something unrepeatable together.

East Forest is on tour right now. You can get tickets here.
Listen to Nature (Gathered) on Spotify · Apple Music · Bandcamp

• Hendrix’ Heirs and the Spawn of the Dead: Psychedelic Music in Our Time

Our partner, judge, and awards MC Dennis Walker published a piece in Head Magazine this month that is well worth your time. It asks a question that doesn’t get asked nearly enough: where is the music?

The first wave of psychedelic culture was held inside a musical container — Hendrix, the Dead, Santana at Woodstock, the Beatles. Today’s renaissance is largely defined on medical and business terms: clinical trials, policy reform, stock prices. The cultural and artistic dimensions have become, in Dennis’s words, something of a sideshow. The beating heart of the psychedelic zeitgeist, he argues, still belongs to the artists and performers synthesising meaning from their experiences through music — they’re just less visible than the press releases.

The piece features a quote from our fellow judge Edward Crowe — music industry executive and high-dose mushroom ceremonialist — on the artists he believes are carrying the torch. Two of our judges, one article, a question the field needs to keep asking.

Dennis Walker · Head Magazine · Edward Crowe

ARTS & CULTURE

• Jen Stark Takes Her Work Somewhere Unexpected

We have never featured a non-psychedelic product in this newsletter. This is not a promotion. But our partner Cool Hunting shared something this month that we couldn’t not talk about — because it isn’t really about the object at all.

Jen Stark is one of the most consistently compelling artists working in psychedelic visual language today. Her 3D sculptures — vivid, layered, organic, mathematically precise — have a quality that is genuinely rare: they look like what expanded consciousness feels like, without being literal about it. No mushrooms, no geometric clichés. Just colour, depth, and the feeling of something opening.

This month, Stark brought that work to a limited-edition collaboration with pickleball gear brand Volair. A hundred and fifty paddles per design. A signed print. A collector’s box.

The object is almost beside the point. What interests us is where the work ends up. Psychedelic aesthetics are migrating — from gallery walls and album covers into the most unexpected functional corners of everyday life. When the visual vocabulary of expanded consciousness lands on a pickleball paddle, something has shifted in the cultural atmosphere.

Stark’s work deserves the attention wherever it goes.

Jen Stark · via Cool Hunting

• Mariano Peccinetti: From Mendoza to Gucci

A Timeout Buenos Aires profile this month introduced many readers to Mariano Peccinetti — a visual artist who blends AI tools and analogue collage to build elaborate, immersive worlds that have found their way into campaigns for Gucci, Rolex, Vogue, and Netflix.

His work occupies a space that is increasingly hard to name: psychedelic in its visual logic, surrealist in its construction, commercial in its reach. Peccinetti’s trajectory is worth tracking not because it is exceptional, but because it is becoming a pattern. Psychedelic aesthetics — the dissolution of rigid forms, the layering of organic and fantastical imagery, the sensory excess — are doing quiet institutional work inside luxury and editorial culture, while the field itself continues to wrestle with what psychedelic design actually means.

What does it mean when the aesthetic travels without the philosophy? That question sits at the heart of much of what we are trying to do here.

Timeout · Mariano Peccinetti

RESEARCH

• The Brain Has One Language for Psychedelics

In what researchers are calling a breakthrough moment for the field, a new mega-analysis published in Nature Medicine has demonstrated for the first time that psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT, and ayahuasca all produce a common pattern of brain activity — despite their profoundly different chemistries, durations, and cultural histories.

Led by researchers at McGill University (including Dr. Manesh Girn, a confirmed speaker at our November conference), the study pooled brain imaging data from 267 participants across labs in five countries — the largest analysis of psychedelic brain imaging ever conducted. What they found: across all five substances, normally tight neural networks weakened internally, while distant brain regions that usually stay segregated began communicating more freely. The clearest version of this cross-talk appeared between the brain’s higher-order thinking networks and the systems that handle vision and touch.

“This is a breakthrough in how we think about psychedelic drugs,” said senior author Danilo Bzdok. “For the first time, we show there’s a common denominator among drugs that we currently consider completely separate.”

Read the full write-up on News-Medical · Nature Medicine paper · Dr. Manesh Girn

• Past Psychedelic Use Predicts Divergent Thinking

A large-scale study drawing on data from 5,905 participants in the Great British Intelligence Test found that people with past psychedelic use scored significantly higher on divergent thinking — the capacity to generate multiple solutions to open-ended problems — compared to non-drug users and people who had used other substances but not psychedelics.

The effect held specifically for divergent thinking, not for cognitive reflection or insight measures, suggesting that psychedelic experience may be associated with a particular kind of cognitive flexibility rather than a general intelligence boost.

The study is naturalistic — it captures real-world users, not controlled dosing — and the researchers are careful to note that correlation is not causation. Personality, openness to experience, and the type of person drawn to psychedelics all play a role. But as a data point in an emerging body of evidence, it is significant.

It’s also exactly the kind of research that belongs at the intersection of psychedelics and design. Divergent thinking is not a side benefit of creative work — it’s the core of it.

arXiv, January 2026

• AI Creativity, Modelled on Psychedelics

A paper in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence argues that psychedelic substances offer both a conceptual and neurocognitive model for designing AI systems that augment human creativity. The central claim: psychedelics enhance creativity by disrupting the Default Mode Network and reducing latent inhibition — and AI systems could be designed to mimic these disruptions by introducing novel cross-domain associations and reframing familiar information in ways that parallel the “associative looseness” seen under psychedelics.

It’s a speculative but thought-provoking frame — and one that sits squarely at the intersection of psychedelic neuroscience and design practice. East Forest’s words above feel like the necessary counterpoint: “human connection and co-creation feel like an antidote to the digital and AI uprising around us.”

Science uses psychedelics to model better machines; artists use them to remember what machines cannot do. Both are live conversations in 2026.

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2025

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• Psychedelics Design Conference — 6–7 November 2026, online

Two days at the intersection of design, creativity, and psychedelics. Confirmed speakers include Robin Carhart-Harris (UCSF), Rick Doblin in conversation with Zoe Wilder, Manesh Girn, and Rayyan Zafar. Full programme and additional speakers announced soon.

Finalists for the 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards will be announced in the autumn. Winners will be announced at the conference.

Get your summer offer ticket for $33 / £25
(Full price from September: $50 / £40)

• Authority Magazine – Interview

Alexandra Plesner spoke with Authority Magazine about the work behind Psychedelics Design — five things she wishes someone had told her when she started.

Read the feature

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• Gift the Groove: Limited-Edition Apparel from Liquid Culture

Liquid Culture is a revolutionary record label, artist collective, and lifestyle brand redefining the intersection of music, visual art, and cultural innovation. LC's exclusive apparel collection makes the perfect gift for yourself and others—the creatives, music lovers, and culture shifters in your life. Featuring limited-edition drops and original artwork from label artists, the collection includes signature hats, hoodies, and accessories that embody Liquid Culture’s fusion of music, art, and style. Each piece is designed with intention and crafted for those who move freely and live boldly. Discover unique, art-forward gifts at

liquidculturerecords.com

• Marlena Robbins Launches Moiré Collective Research

Our judge, collaborator, and friend Marlena Robbins has launched her consulting practice: Moiré Collective Research.

In her own words: “Moiré brings Indigenous knowledge and scientific rigor together for the psychedelic field. I help programs, researchers, and organizations engage Indigenous communities and knowledge with care — through engagement strategy, research design, program and fellowship building, and Indigenous data sovereignty.”

At a moment when the field is scaling rapidly and the risk of extractive practice is real, Marlena’s work is not a niche specialisation — it is a foundational competency the entire field needs. We are proud to know her and encourage everyone in this community to explore what she is building.

moirecollectiveresearch.com

• MAPS: PS27 Speaker Submissions Open + "Relocating the Root"

Two notable announcements from MAPS this month. Speaker submissions for Psychedelic Science 2027 — taking place in Denver, May 2027 — are now open. Fingers crossed everyone!

MAPS also published “Relocating the Root” — a first-of-its-kind scoping literature review on the mental health needs of people directly impacted by the criminal legal system, and the potential role of psychedelic healing in that context. It is sober, necessary, and worth reading.

MAPS · PS27 speaker submissions · Relocating the Root

• World Mushroom Forum — August 21st, Online

The World Mushroom Forum, produced by Mycopreneur founder Dennis Walker in collaboration with Oli Genn-Bash of The Fungi Consultant, is Our partner Dennis Walker (Mycopreneur) and Oli Genn-Bash (The Fungi Consultant) are launching the World Mushroom Forum — a three-day online gathering bringing together medicinal mushrooms, psychedelic research, regenerative agriculture, biotech, cultivation, policy, and Indigenous perspectives from across the global fungi space.

Like us, they’ve chosen entirely online: a deliberate choice to make access and participation possible across continents rather than concentrated in one room. We love the alignment and can’t wait to join in!

They made us a little discount code, use PSYCHDESIGN10 to get 10% off the ticket!

worldmushroomforum.com · Mycopreneur · The Fungi Consultant

• Fireside Project: Lucy — AI-Powered Clinician Training

Fireside Project launched Lucy — described as the world’s first AI-powered simulation and training platform designed to prepare clinicians for psychedelic-assisted therapy. Lucy was built on anonymised support conversations from 7,000 Fireside Project users, giving clinicians a way to practise holding difficult psychedelic experiences before they encounter them in clinical settings.

It is a genuinely interesting problem: how do you train a human to be present with another human in a radically altered state?

Above all, Fireside Project offers free, confidential support to anyone navigating a psychedelic experience, now available also through our Fireside Project App! Innovation on all

We are excited to go much deeper on this at the November conference, where Fireside Project founder Joshua White, joined by one of Lucy’s engineers to walk us through the platform from the inside — from ideation and design to how it is working in practice. A rare look at the full arc of a product built at the intersection of harm reduction, AI, and psychedelic care.

We are genuinly honoured to be partners with this innovative organisation!

firesideproject.org · App

• Imperial College London / Carhart-Harris Lab: June Preprint

A new preprint from the Carhart-Harris Lab (based at UCSF) and collaborators at Imperial landed in June: “Distinct brain responses to psilocybin and escitalopram in depression captured by the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem.” For those following the ongoing comparison between psilocybin and conventional antidepressants, this is the latest chapter — using a new mathematical framework to map the differences in how the brain responds to each.

We will have more to say about Robin Carhart-Harris’s work in November, when he joins us for the conference ahead of his forthcoming book.

Imperial College London Centre for Psychedelic Research · Carhart-Harris Lab

• University of Exeter / Wellcome: £2.5m PATHS Study Launched

A £2.5 million Wellcome-funded study — PATHS: Psychedelics as Therapeutics: Harm Reduction and Safety — has launched at the University of Exeter in partnership with the University of Leicester. It is among the first studies designed to examine real-world psychedelic use outside clinical settings: why people are turning to these treatments, how they are managing risk and supporting one another, and what can be done to make informal therapeutic use safer.

This is an important corrective to a research landscape that has largely focused on controlled trial conditions. Most psychedelic use happens outside of clinics. This study finally asks: what can we learn from that?

Drug Science, a partner of Psychedelics Design, sits within the broader ecosystem that supports this kind of evidence-based, harm-reduction-centred research.

Full story: University of Exeter · Drug Science

ON OUR READING PILE

A new regular section — what we're reading, what's sitting on the table, what doesn't fit neatly into any category but belongs here anyway. More books, films, articles, and resources we've curated with care over the past year live in our free resources library.

• Exile & Ecstasy — Madison Margolin

Journalist, DoubleBlind co-founder, and daughter of the Ram Dass world, Madison Margolin has written a memoir that traces the fault lines between Jewish mysticism and psychedelic culture. Part confession, part reportage, it asks what it means to seek transcendence when you've grown up inside it. A rare book that treats consciousness as something inherited.

• Your Symphony of Selves — Dr. James Fadiman & Jordan Gruber

Journalist, DoubleBlind co-founder, and daughter of the Ram Dass world, Madison Margolin has written a memoir that traces the fault lines between Jewish mysticism and psychedelic culture. Part confession, part reportage, it asks what it means to seek transcendence when you’ve grown up inside it. A rare book that treats consciousness as something inherited, not just discovered. We’ve been waiting for this one.

• Le Deuxième Sexe — Simone de Beauvoir (not psychedelics)

We have been missing words that float into sentences that feel poetic and rea — that can carry enormous weight without compromising the quality of the language. De Beauvoir has them. (And yes, also this English translation.) If you haven’t read it yet, I promise this is a rewarding experience!

That's the June roundup. See you soon with another interview and podcast — we spoke with two of our judges this month, and hope to keep inspiring people to explore the questions that sit at the heart of everything we do here: what can psychedelics do for design, and what can design do for psychedelics. ♡

Know a designer, creative director, or agency working adjacent to this space? Forward this to one person who should be reading it.

Share

We’re one week out from the close of the 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards.

Submissions close July 1st — and for the next 72 hours only, the entry fee drops to $30 (usually $45).

If you’ve been sitting on a project, a body of work, a product, a piece of writing, a concept — this is the moment.

The process is simple:

→ Go to the form

→ Add your project

→ Link your work

→ Upload images if you have them

→ Submit

That’s it.

We have nine categories this year: Visual Design & Branding, Art & Photography, Storytelling, Music & Audio, Products & Services, Educational & Community, Architecture & Space, Film & Moving Image, and Experimental.

A world-class jury is waiting — researchers, designers, journalists, and cultural figures who are taking this seriously. Your work deserves to be seen.

Submit at psychedelics.design/awards before June 26th to lock in the $30 rate. Full price resumes June 27th. Hard deadline July 1st.

SUBMIT TODAY

Good luck!

Alexandra
Founder, Psychedelics Design

Some publications arrive as if they were always supposed to exist. DoubleBlind is one of them.

Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin co-founded DoubleBlind in 2019 — a print magazine and media platform that has, against considerable odds, maintained a commitment to real journalism in a space that often prefers advocacy. Both came from rigorous editorial backgrounds: CBS News, Rolling Stone, LA Weekly, Vice, Columbia Journalism School. Both had been covering cannabis and psychedelics long before it was fashionable. And when Shelby had the idea — arriving, as she describes it, during a morning meditation with a quality of knowing she calls “noetic” — she called Madison, and they built something.

What drew me to this conversation was how clearly they hold the tension this field demands: being part of a movement while also being willing to investigate it. Covering something you care about deeply without becoming a mouthpiece for it. Designing a magazine that refuses most psychedelic cliché while remaining unmistakably of the culture.

DoubleBlind just published their first book — this felt like the right moment to talk.

The Interview

On how DoubleBlind began

The name came before the magazine did. Shelby and Madison had previously discussed a podcast — tentatively called DoubleBlind, after the clinical trial methodology — but it never quite landed. Then one morning in 2015, after years of daily meditation practice that Shelby had started following her first ayahuasca ceremony, something shifted. “There was a stillness there, and when the idea came, it just felt very true. There was no doubt there.” She describes it as noetic — that quality of knowing that people also report under psychedelics. The podcast idea came back as a print magazine, and the rest followed.

Madison, who had been covering the same terrain across the same outlets, was an immediate yes. “I was really excited by the prospect of something that would be both informative and at a journalistic standard that Shelby and I had learned — as well as having an aesthetic to match that standard.”

On what "double blind" actually means

In clinical research, a double-blind trial is one where neither the researcher nor the participant knows who has received the active compound versus the placebo. For a magazine covering psychedelic science and policy, it's the right nod. But Shelby points to a second layer: "What are you blind to in your regular life? What's the sort of deeper truth?" Psychedelics, she notes, have a way of removing blinders — of revealing layers of reality that weren't accessible before. The name holds both meanings at once.

On what was missing before DoubleBlind existed

Shelby and Madison came to psychedelics through cannabis journalism — which meant they arrived with a clear-eyed view of what can go wrong when an emerging industry encounters commercialisation. Madison’s first article in DoubleBlind’s inaugural issue examined the lessons the psychedelic industry could learn from cannabis’s missteps. The ethical impulse was there from the start. “We weren’t just advocates for psychedelics as a panacea for mental health. We were talking about the limitations, the potential harms — what happens when a sacred plant or fungi goes through the FDA approval process and becomes more about sterilisation and marketing than spirituality, therapy, community.”

The first issue also included a story about awe — not about psychedelics directly, but about how the brain responds to expanses of blue, to oceanic experience. “We were using psychedelics as a jumping-off point to explore policy, science, culture, spirituality, all sorts of other topics.”

On the hard editorial decisions

Being a journalist covering a field you’re personally embedded in brings a particular kind of pressure. Madison describes situations where leaders in the psychedelic space — sometimes people DoubleBlind had partnered with on events — became the subjects of stories that needed to be reported with full independence. “Someone whose company was under scrutiny would try to go around the journalist and get to me or Shelby. And I saw a lot of it as really about identity — knowing which hat you’re wearing when.”

The journalism, whatever gets published in the magazine or online, is held to a standard that’s independent of any partnership or relationship. Shelby adds that peyote has consistently been the field’s most charged topic: conservation, access for non-Native people, the difficulty of covering Indigenous communities without an Indigenous journalist.

On being kicked off Instagram — three times

DoubleBlind has been removed from Instagram three times. They got back on each time through persistent campaigns and, ultimately, a contact at Meta who personally walked the situation to the relevant department. The argument that worked: they’re a California-registered company, with employees on payroll, liability insurance, and a consistent record of declining opportunities to sell anything illegal. “We’ve been given plenty of opportunities to sell mushrooms and we’ve always said no.”

The Google situation was arguably worse. In December 2020, the so-called Medic Update — designed to suppress COVID misinformation — swept up psychedelic content wholesale, on the logic that psychedelics are “alternative.” DoubleBlind lost more than half their website traffic overnight. So did Third Wave, Chacruna, and most other organisations in the space. Nobody at Google was paying attention to psychedelics specifically — the algorithm simply placed them in the same category as anti-mask content. “At this point, I don’t know how much it matters anyway, because now we’re just in a whole new phase of algorithm wars with the rise of ChatGPT and AI.”

The more durable question, Shelby says, is whether the work should really be shaped by ever-changing platform logic at all. “In an ideal world, the work just speaks for itself and word of mouth — which has always been the best form of marketing — is what enables you to sustain over time. But maybe that’s romantic.

On the book — and why print still matters

The DoubleBlind Guide to Psychedelics is their first book on the subject, three years in the making. Madison describes it as capturing both the history of where the field is right now and the evergreen information people need to engage with these substances with intentionality — not just dosage guides, but lineage, reciprocity, context. “If you’re doing ayahuasca, there are people who have been stewarding this medicine for so long. How can someone have a relationship of reciprocity with them?”

Shelby puts it plainly: “No algorithm can kill that one.” The print magazine was always partly a response to the distraction economy — the sense that reading on a screen is already an altered state, one that pulls you away rather than into the material. A book that people keep, that they return to, that looks beautiful next to a cup of coffee or a bouquet of flowers — it serves a different purpose. It’s a commitment, not a scroll.

On design — and the “no fractals” rule

From the beginning, DoubleBlind operated with a clear aesthetic mandate: no fractals. Not stereotypically psychedelic, not stereotypically clinical. “Professional but fun, colourful but not too neon.” The creative vision that made this possible belongs in large part to their designer David Good, who Madison describes as foundational to the magazine’s identity, and who is one of this year’s judges in the Visual Design category! “The design really elevates and shifts the way people think about psychedelics. It positions it in a different cultural milieu.”

The book extends this: alongside more clinical chapters, it includes visionary art — work from Indigenous traditions of South America that the Western eye tends to label “psychedelic art” but that those communities would simply call the art of people who have been influential in their culture. Putting that in conversation with artists like Alex Grey, within the same book, is its own kind of statement.

On what’s next

Madison has a second book coming — a Jewish psychedelic practical guide, using Jewish practice, ritual, and philosophy as the set and setting for navigating psychedelic experience. Her first, Exile and Ecstasy, is a journalistic memoir about growing up in the movement surrounding Ram Dass. Shelby, as it turns out, is also a singer-songwriter. You can find her on Spotify.

Find Madison and Shelpy on:
madisonmargolin.com • shelbyannehartman.com • The Book

🎙️ PODCAST

This interview was recorded as part of the Psychedelics Design podcast. Listen to the full conversation → Psy*Design Podcast

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• The World Mushroom Forum

The World Mushroom Forum is a multi-day online gathering co-organised by Mycopreneur founder Dennis Walker and Oli Genn-Bash of The Fungi Consultant. Bringing together voices from across the global mushroom industry, it covers everything from indigenous perspectives and medicinal potential to biotechnology, psychedelic research, cultivation, and policy reform.

The inaugural forum runs August 21st–23rd, with speakers and attendees joining from across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

Get your ticket here → dandelion.events/e/worldmushroomforum

• When the Protocol Fails: Holding Space in Crisis — Psychedelic Coaching Institute

Paul F. Austin, founder of Third Wave and the Psychedelic Coaching Institute, is hosting a free live training on Wednesday June 17 for practitioners navigating the moments no checklist prepares you for. When the Protocol Fails: The Art of Holding Space in Crisis covers how to read nervous system warning signs in real time, when to step in versus hold back, and how to know when a situation exceeds your scope. Built for coaches, clinicians, and aspiring practitioners who want to stay grounded when a session goes off-script.

→ Save your spot

• Looking for work in psychedelics?

Psychedelic Alpha’s job board is the go-to for roles across biotech, clinical research, policy, care delivery, and advocacy. Whether you’re job-seeking or hiring, it’s the most comprehensive talent network in the field.

→ Browse open roles

“Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”

– Carl Sagan

Welcome to Psychedelics Design – where design meets psychedelics!

Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin, co-founders of DoubleBlind Magazine, join us to discuss building the field’s most design-forward publication from scratch — and what it actually takes to maintain journalistic integrity in a space you care deeply about.

We trace the origin of DoubleBlind from a meditation-born idea in New Orleans to a print magazine, online platform, and now the first coffee table book on psychedelics. Shelby and Madison share the hard editorial decisions that come with covering a movement you’re embedded in, the “no fractals” design philosophy behind their aesthetic, and what it felt like to lose half their web traffic overnight to a Google algorithm that couldn’t tell psychedelic journalism from anti-mask content.

The conversation asks a question this field keeps circling: how do you tell the full story — including the uncomfortable parts — without becoming a mouthpiece for it?

Key Takeaways from the Episode

1. Psychedelics as a lens, not just a substance DoubleBlind was never just about drugs — from the first issue they used psychedelics as a jumping-off point to explore awe, policy, culture, spirituality. That framing is what gave them longevity and a broader audience.

2. Design is not decoration — it’s positioning The “no fractals” rule was strategic, not aesthetic. By refusing every psychedelic cliché, they placed themselves in a different cultural conversation entirely. David Good’s design changed how people thought about the subject.

3. Journalistic independence is non-negotiable, even when it’s uncomfortable When people in their own network became subjects of stories, they held the line. The editorial standard stays separate from partnerships, events, sponsorships. Knowing which hat you’re wearing at any given moment is what protects both the journalism and the relationships.

4. Algorithms are not a foundation Losing 50%+ of traffic overnight to a Google update, being kicked off Instagram three times — their conclusion: Word of mouth and work that stands on its own are the only durable things.

5. Physical objects resist the attention economy Both the print magazine and the book were deliberate responses to distracted, scrolling consumption. Holding something in your hands is already an altered state relative to a screen. No algorithm can touch it.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Shelby Hartman is the co-founder and Publisher of DoubleBlind, a media company at the forefront of the psychedelic movement. She’s reported for Rolling Stone, VICE, Playboy, Quartz, LA Weekly, and the Huffington Post, among others. Her work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, Business Insider, KCRW, Bustle, and Forbes, and she’s been invited to speak at SXSW, Horizons: Perspectives in Psychedelics, and Harvard Law School. In 2020, she was named by Forbes as a female leader in cannabis and psychedelics. She’s a graduate of Columbia Journalism School.

Madison Rachel Margolin is an author, journalist, and facilitator, trained in Lev Emunah Therapy (based in Kabbalistic and Breslov concepts), narrative therapy, and MAPS Zendo Sit (psychedelic space holding). Her first book is a journalistic memoir entitled Exile & Ecstasy: Growing Up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground (Hay House, 2023), while her second and third books — The DoubleBlind Guide to Psychedelics (Artisan Books, 2026; co-written with Shelby Hartman) and Judaism is Psychedelic: A Practical Guide (Ayin Press, 2027) — are forthcoming. She is the co-founder of both DoubleBlind Magazine and the Jewish Psychedelic Summit, and hosts a podcast on the Be Here Now Network called Set & Setting. She has written for dozens of publications including Vice, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, and has presented on psychedelics, Judaism, and more at conferences around the world, spanning NYC, Denver, London, and Israel. Based between New York and Israel, Madison spends her free time practicing yoga and dancing.

DoubleBlind

DoubleBlind is a media company and education platform at the forefront of the rapidly growing psychedelic movement. With contributors around the globe, DoubleBlind covers stories from South America’s ayahuasca tourism industry to the microdosing trend and the groundbreaking research at leading universities. At the core of DoubleBlind’s reporting are some of the most important issues of our time: the depression epidemic, the corporatization of medicine, and the aching people feel for spirituality or some other collective sense of meaning — all presented in visually compelling, rigorous long-form features, poetry, art, and photo essays.

Learn more at doubleblindmag.com.

MORE EPISODES

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We have been building quietly. Over the past 6 months, while the awards and festival have been the visible work, we have also been putting something more foundational in place: an educational section on the Psychedelics Design website that we think of as a living library — curated books, films, podcasts, newsletters, organisations, and a growing video archive of talks, panels, and conversations at the intersection of psychedelics and creativity. It is there, and it is free. psychedelics.design/resources-library

We built it because the question we hear most often from designers, agencies, and creative practitioners entering this space is a little less on trends or branding — but rather more basic: where do I start? The educational section is our answer. And it matters to us that it exists, because we believe the room where psychedelic culture-makers convene could already be furnished.

Which brings us to the news in this issue. NPR’s May piece asked directly whether psychedelics are getting a Silicon Valley makeover — optimisation language replacing healing language, performance framing replacing therapeutic framing. It’s a question design can’t afford to treat as rhetorical. The visual vocabulary being established now — what “legitimate psychedelic medicine” looks like, what “psychedelic wellness” feels like — will shape public understanding of these tools for a generation. Designers working in this space, I would argue, have more influence on how people feel with design solutions than they might think at first, given psychedelics are non-specific amplyfiers. This newsletter exists, in part, to educate that about conscious choice making.

We also welcome three new advisors, the Awards deadline is moving closer with July 1st, and art shows are embracing the psychedelic experience. Read on.

DESIGN & CREATIVITY

• Are Psychedelics Getting a Tech Rebrand?

NPR's May 2026 report put into plain language what many in this field have been watching uneasily: a sector that emerged from therapy, Indigenous tradition, and countercultural thought is increasingly being reframed through the language of Silicon Valley optimisation. Performance. Productivity. Edge. Dozens of small drugmakers — many backed by tech investors including Peter Thiel — are now in the race to win FDA approval for psychedelic compounds. The vocabulary is shifting with the money. The piece raises a question that has design implications as much as political ones: when visual identity, brand language, and experience design follow the framing of their funders, what gets lost? The cultural DNA of psychedelics — rooted in dissolution of ego, in collective healing, in ecological connection — sits uncomfortably inside the rhetoric of productivity and return on investment. Designers working in this space are not neutral.

NPR

• Michael Pollan Turns to AI — and What That Tells Us About Psychedelics

Pollan's new book A World Appears tackles consciousness and artificial intelligence — but the connective tissue is the same question psychedelics have always posed: what is the relationship between felt experience and the physical brain? Arguing via neuroscientist Antonio Damasio that feeling may precede computation, Pollan pushes back against AI's cognition-first framing. The implication for designers is direct: the psychedelic experience is irreducibly somatic and felt. Any design that treats the mind as a processor to be optimised may be starting from the wrong place.

NPR · Rolling Stone · His talk at Bioneer now in our Video Library

• Psychedelics: Art. Culture. Science. — Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, CA

The most ambitious museum exhibition on the subject yet: historical artefacts, Indigenous traditions, brain science, and immersive multimedia tracing psychedelics across millennia. The curatorial challenge alone is worth studying — how do you tell a story that is simultaneously ancient and urgently contemporary, sacred and scientific, stigmatised and mainstream?

6 June 2026 - December 6 2026 · rom.on.ca

• Living Labyrinths: Art & Fungi — Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, UK

Beatrix Potter's botanical watercolours alongside immersive bio-sonic sound art and installations by contemporary artists. Natural history and visionary art in the same room — a combination that feels exactly right for this moment.

3 October 2026 – 21 February 2027 · rammuseum.org.uk

THEORY

• What Is Lost When Psychedelics Move Into the Clinic? Walter Benjamin Has Thoughts

A paper in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews applies Walter Benjamin's concept of aura — the singular, ritually rooted quality stripped away by mechanical reproduction — to the medicalisation of psychedelic experience. When psychedelics move from ceremonial use to standardised clinical settings, the authors argue, the very qualities that make them potent (unpredictability, personal meaning, cultural embedding) are what gets designed out. The paper isn't anti-medicalisation; it proposes ways to preserve authenticity within institutional frameworks. But its provocation is one design can't sidestep: the context is the medicine. What we build around these experiences is never neutral.

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

RESEARCH WORTH NOTING

Psychology Today: The New Science of Psychedelics and Creative Breakthroughs

Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D. — clinical professor and Director of the Center for Mindfulness at UC San Diego — published a lucid and well-sourced overview in Psychology Today of the emerging science connecting psychedelics to creative insight. Vieten maps the neuroscience (psychedelics quieting the default mode network, allowing unusual associations to form across brain regions), surveys the historical precedents (Kekulé’s benzene ring, Francis Crick, Steve Jobs), and profiles contemporary researchers including Manesh Girn, Kalina Christoff, Isabel Weissner, Christine Chesebrough, and Jonathan Schooler. The framing is careful: psychedelics expand what Vieten calls the “imagination’s search space,” making new ideas possible rather than guaranteed. What follows still depends on discernment, skill, and sustained effort. She also resists the temptation to romanticise — not every vision is useful, not every insight is true. As the field accelerates toward clinical approval and commercial scale, this kind of measured, rigorous public communication is exactly what’s needed to keep the discourse honest.

Psychology Today

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• Welcoming Three New Voices to the Advisory Circle

We are delighted to welcome three new advisors who bring deep, distinct expertise to the Psychedelics Design community.

• Joshua White — Founder of the Fireside Project, the psychedelic peer support line that has become one of the most trusted harm reduction resources in the field. Before devoting his career to psychedelics, Joshua spent over a decade as a Deputy City Attorney in San Francisco, co-teaching a nationally recognised clinic at Yale Law School and suing businesses exploiting vulnerable communities. He is also a lawyer, researcher, and long-time volunteer peer support provider. Joshua brings something this field urgently needs more of: a rigorous, equity-centred, harm-reduction perspective at the table.

• Joe Moore — Co-founder and CEO of Psychedelics Today, the most influential media platform in the psychedelic field. Over a decade, Joe has trained over 500 students through the VITAL certificate programme and built one of the most trusted voices in psychedelic media. His commitment to safety, integration, and careful stewardship of the cultural moment is exactly the kind of grounding this community needs.

• Dr. Joyce Braverman — Medical doctor, certified psychedelic therapist (CIIS), and integrative practitioner combining functional medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. With a background in paediatric surgical oncology and a deep commitment to the healing potential of plant medicines, Dr. Braverman brings rigorous clinical thinking to the intersection of psychedelics and the body. She has been active at the intersection of psychedelics and design practice for some time — and we are very glad to make it official.

• We’re in COOL HUNTING — Thank You

A warm thank you to COOL HUNTING for featuring the 2026 Awards in their Design section this week. COOL HUNTING has been championing thoughtful, culturally resonant design since 2003 — being in their pages and with Josh Rubin as both judge and editorial voice, means a great deal to us. If you found your way here through them: welcome. The Awards are open until July 1st, and there’s a 30% discount for Cool Hunting readers at checkout with code COOLHUNTING26.

Read the feature →

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• Zendo Project — Sitting & Integration Training (SIT) Europe

I wanted to share a few resources from Zendo Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit focused on psychedelic harm reduction, peer support, and community care.

For more than a decade, Zendo Project has provided on-the-ground support at festivals and gatherings, helping people navigate challenging psychedelic experiences with compassion and dignity. Their work led to the development of Zendo’s Four Principles of Psychedelic Care, a widely used framework for peer support and harm reduction.

Zendo Project also offers the Sitting & Integration Training (SIT), a 12-hour live online course focused on practical, presence-based support skills for challenging experiences. Their upcoming June 6–7 weekend intensive is the only Europe-friendly cohort this year, running 5:00–11:30 PM CEST each day.

They’re offering 30% off with code PSYDESIGN for this cohort.

Free Mini Course · Zendo Psychedelic Companion Guide · Sitting & Integration Training (SIT)

Be a part of the community safety net, so we can continue to explore and grow together.

• Partner Spotlight: Jahan Khamsehzadeh, PhD

Jahan Khamsehzadeh is a psychedelic scholar, author and facilitator — and a member of the Ethics and Review Committee of the 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards.

He is hosting a small group ceremony in the East Bay on Saturday July 10th, held within a three-part container including a preparation call, the in-person ceremony and a group integration session. The work draws on a protocol he has facilitated across approximately 750 ceremonies.

Cost is sliding scale $650–$1,000. If you have worked with Jahan before and feel called to join, reply directly to his email or visit:

psychedelicevolution.org

• Jess Jorgensen from Sporeseight at Future Days

What if the best thing you did this year was let something rot? This is the provocation for a collective imagination and mini masterclass in decomposition practice, hosted by our judge Jess Jorgensen, founder of Sporesight at this year’s Future Days gathering in Copenhagen. Together, participants will learn from nature’s most badass decomposers - fungi - how to unlock new forms of value by breaking things down. We’ll apply fungal logic to the economies of death - human remains, grief, ritual, legacy - decomposing each and asking: what needs to rot, and what meaning grows next?

Link for more info and to sign up: https://luma.com/dxkd42s0

The psychedelic experience has always needed a witness — someone to receive it, interpret it, give it form. That is what designers do. The work of this field isn't just what happens inside the session; it's every surface, every word, every space built around it. How we design around these experiences matters more than ever.

See you in a couple of weeks with a new interview.

Submitting work to the Awards? Deadline is July 1st → psychedelics.design/awards<3

Know a designer, creative director, or agency working adjacent to this space? Forward this to one person who should be reading it.

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Some people you meet and immediately understand: this is someone who holds things together. gina vensel is one of those people.

gina works at MAPS on Educational & Community Impact, where she manages community partnerships as part of the Psychedelic Science team. She’s also a co-steward of the Three Rivers Psychedelic Society in Pittsburgh — and one of the founding voices behind the Psychedelic Writers Guild, a coalition working to reshape how mainstream media covers this field.

What drew me to this conversation was Gina’s refusal to separate the personal from the systemic. She talks about community as something you tend to, protect, fund, and sometimes take a break from. She brings that same groundedness to questions about harm reduction, media representation, commercialisation, and the ongoing consequences of the War on Drugs.

This is a conversation about what it actually takes to build something that lasts.

The Interview

On what a healthy community looks like

For gina, it comes down to something simple but demanding: compassion, trust, protection, and solidarity. “When communities look out for one another, they become stronger.” That’s the baseline. Everything else — the events, the content, the partnerships — is built on top of that foundation, or it isn’t worth building. “There has been a growing number of predators in the space, and many retreats and leaders are causing more harm than good. I'd like to see more coverage on this and how we can keep our community safe.”

On the stories still missing from the media

The gap gina points to is significant. Most psychedelic use happens outside clinical settings — and most media coverage ignores that entirely, particularly when it involves Indigenous communities and underground practice. The newly-founded Psychedelic Writers Guild is working to change that, bringing together journalists who are part of the movement themselves to produce content that reflects its actual diversity and complexity. “When we focus on collaboration over competition,” gina says, “our stories will be shared more widely.” It’s a media ecosystem built from the inside out.

On where the most meaningful impact is happening right now

gina is clear-eyed about the current moment. A recent executive order has sent another wave of momentum through the psychedelic movement — but she's cautious. "Flashy headlines can lead the public to misunderstand the laws governing adult use." Psychedelics remain Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act. Personal use can still result in prison time. Staying grounded in evidence-based content isn't just good practice — it's a form of harm reduction in itself. Her role at MAPS, managing community partnerships, is one way she holds that line: connecting organisations to share information, resources, and wisdom. "We are co-creating this community together, like a mycelial web."

On maintaining integrity as the space commercialises

"By being an active listener, staying grounded, and being impeccable with my word." gina’s answer to this question could have been structural — about policies, vetting, accountability frameworks. Instead it's personal. Show up when the community needs support. Don't rush to judge. Offer resources freely. "I love serving as a community connector and helping others find the resources they need." Integrity, in her framing, is a daily practice — not a positioning statement.

On what education means in this context

Harm reduction. Understanding local and national laws. Testing your substances. The importance of set and setting. Integration. These are the core of what it means to educate responsibly as psychedelics move into mainstream awareness. The knowledge gap isn't just about clinical outcomes; it's about keeping people safe in the real conditions they're actually navigating.

On sustaining yourself within community work

Holding space for others — especially those dealing with emotional and mental struggles — takes something out of you. gina knows this from experience. "I have to give myself time in solitude to replenish my energy. I meditate and give myself permission to rest." It's a small thing to name, and an important one. The people doing the most essential community work are often the ones least resourced to keep doing it.

On the gap between grassroots and institutional

Whether it’s a large nonprofit or a small meetup group, the challenge is the same: funding. So much of the psychedelic movement runs on unpaid volunteer labour. “I hope we can lean on each other for support” — a sentence that functions both as observation and as invitation.

On safety and challenge in the same space

Trust takes time. Don’t rush it. Once trust is established, you can go deeper. And critically: leaders who try to carry everything alone don’t just burn out — they risk being perceived as ego-driven rather than community-focused. Her advice: “Delegate responsibility, offer transparency, and be open to feedback.” It’s a model for community leadership that applies well beyond the psychedelic space.

On storytelling as cultural shift

Storytelling works, gina argues, because it lets people hear firsthand how transformative psychedelics can be — for personal growth and healing, for raising consciousness, for connecting with nature, for deepening relationships. Stories do what data can’t. They make the abstract viscerally real.

On the culture we’re collectively building

“I believe that we’re designing a culture of community care, rooted in compassion and harm reduction.” And embedded in that is a longer reckoning: the War on Drugs has left lasting damage on communities. Restorative justice isn’t optional — it’s foundational. The field’s future has to be built on ethics and safety, or it will repeat the patterns it claims to be moving beyond.

🎙️ PODCAST

Prefer to listen? Before this interview, we already had gina as a guest on our podcast.

→ Listen here

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

We’re delighted to share that gina vensel will be returning as a judge for the Psychedelics Design Awards — for the second year in a row.

Her perspective on community, integrity, and what it means to build something lasting in this space is exactly the kind of lens these awards need. We’re grateful to have her back.

→ Learn more about the awards

We are in the midst of co-curating the upcoming online awards and event – and much more. Stay tuned!

Find gina on:
LinkedIn • Instagram • MAPS

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

• The Psychedelics Design Awards are getting noticed.
We’re honoured that the Awards were featured in both the Tricycle Day newsletter — one of the most widely-read publications in the psychedelic space — and the Dieline Newsletter, a go-to for the global packaging and branding community. Two very different worlds, one shared signal: design and psychedelics belong in the same conversation. Applications are open across nine categories — branding, architecture, storytelling, music, and more — and close July 1. → Apply for the Awards

• Introducing The Huxley Club — our new membership community.
We just launched The Huxley Club: a membership for designers, creatives, and curious people working at the intersection of psychedelics and culture.

Named after Aldous Huxley — who took mescaline in 1953 and wrote The Doors of Perception, the book that gave the counterculture its intellectual framework — the club is the space for the conversations that don’t fit in a newsletter. Full session recordings, a growing digital library, monthly community calls, and a WhatsApp group of 100+ psychedelic creatives already inside.

Founding memberships are $90/year — locked forever, and available until October 2026. The first 20 members get a free advisory 1-on-1 with Alexandra Plesner, designer and founder of Psychedelics Design.

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.” — Aldous Huxley

→ Join The Huxley Club

• It’s an honour to share that Pernille Brostrup joined us as a strategic advisor!

A Danish native who built Mabel as a civilian, not a clinician or academic. Her path sits in the tradition of citizen science that shaped much of late nineteenth-century discovery, where curiosity and lived struggle, not credentials, moved the work forward. Her own version of that struggle came as years of stress, anxiety, and burnout that found no relief in conventional approaches. It led her to medicinal plants and earth medicines, and she didn’t look back.

That journey became Mabel: a company operating at the intersection of psychedelics, mental health, and functional mushrooms, with a particular focus on women. Mabel pairs psilocybin microdosing protocols with multi-week guided programs and continuous outcome tracking. Microdosing softens the inner architecture that holds old patterns in place. The program provides the scaffolding for what comes next. Together they produce meaningful change on a timeline neither tool can reach alone.

The mission is accessibility without compromise.

What sets Mabel apart is the depth of the work behind the product. The broader microdosing conversation has too often relied on anecdote, or extrapolated findings from full-dose clinical research and presented them as if they applied directly to microdosing. Mabel has built a structured Mindful Microdosing Program co-designed with Dr. Shauna Shapiro, with neuroscientist Dr. Amir Lotfi serving as Mabel’s Chief Scientific Officer and leading the research arm. The company has gathered proprietary data across more than 8,000 clients and is currently developing AI tooling designed to help individuals shift patterns, rework lifestyle, and process trauma with real precision. Mabel was articulating the compounding effects of microdosing long before the current wave of microdosing guides entered the market, and is now pushing the practice into territory the wider community has not yet caught up to.

The ambition is a new category in mental health. One that moves past GAD-7 and PHQ-9 scores as the only signal of progress, and develops new modalities for assessing where a woman actually is in her life. Not just symptoms ticked off a list, but agency, self-trust, creative capacity, direction.

Pernille brings to Psychedelics Design a founder’s instinct, a personal relationship with the subject matter, and a sharp eye for where culture and wellness are heading, particularly for women, a community still underserved by the mainstream psychedelic conversation.

We are building the upcoming awards and conference together — more to come.

And on a personal note: I have long been an admirer of Pernille and her work — having her as an advisor is another genuine pinch-me moment.

Connect via Pernille Brostrup · Mabel Life · Dr. Shauna Shapiro · Dr. Amir Lotfi

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• Jalen Salazar at SF Design Week – The Unconscious Creative
We’re excited to share that our friend and advisor Jalen Salazar will be hosting an intimate gathering during this year’s SF Design Week in the Bay Area on June 9th. The Unconscious Creative is a blend of plenary and small-group conversations designed to invite deeply engaged, unguarded, and intentional dialogue—exploring the creator behind the creator.

If you are in San Francisco during SF Design Week, we highly recommend attending.

Learn more here: https://sfdesignweek.org/event/the-unconscious-creative-an-intimate-salon-of-creative-inquiry/

We're always open to partnerships — whether you're a speaker, sponsor, event collaborator, contributing designer or editor, or an organisation whose work aligns with ours; community support is unpaid and mutual: we champion what we believe in, and stand behind those who stand behind us. Reach out if you feel like connecting.

One day past Bicycle Day — the anniversary of Albert Hofmann’s first intentional LSD trip — President Trump signed an executive order directing the FDA to fast-track psychedelic therapies, allocating federal funding for state-level research and establishing a Right to Try pathway for investigational psychedelic drugs. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the signal was clear: psychedelics are moving from the cultural margins toward policy, medicine, and mainstream legitimacy faster than most expected.

The policy move didn’t happen in isolation. April also brought Sara Ricciardi’s Serotonin — The Chemistry of Happiness to Milan Design Week — American Express commissioning an artist to translate neurochemistry into a physical sensory environment, installed in the loggia of the Pinacoteca di Brera. It was not explicitly psychedelic. But it was designing around the same terrain: how altered states of body and mind produce meaning, beauty, and feeling.

And UC Berkeley’s Altered States podcast won a Webby Award for its episode exploring DMT and near-death experience. Psychedelics journalism, made with the craft of public radio, is reaching mainstream cultural recognition.

A few of those things in one month, from completely different directions. Something is moving.

And we have some news of our own. We are proud to announce the first judges and media partners for the 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards — and we are genuinely thrilled about the people who have said yes.

DESIGN & CREATIVITY

The cultural forms are catching up to the science. This month, psychedelics produced award-winning journalism, a new therapeutic modality, a film retrospective, and a Harvard argument about whether the dancefloor still matters. The field is pushing in everyday culture.

BAMPFA’s Psychedelia & Cinema — Still Running Through May 10
Organized with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, this film series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is the most ambitious institutional curatorial statement on psychedelics and moving image in years. The series spans Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (with Tilda Swinton), Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (paired with Bruce Conner’s Looking for Mushrooms), Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, and Roger Corman’s The Trip. Curated by Tony Martin and Maya Acharya at the BCSP. Tickets still available for remaining screenings.

BAMPFA · BCSP Film Festival

Chacruna’s Psychedelic Culture 2026 — Three Days at Brava, SF (Apr 17–19)
The Chacruna Institute’s annual flagship conference returned to the Brava Theater for Women in the Arts in San Francisco’s Mission District. Three simultaneous tracks across three days: Indigenous Reciprocity & Decolonial Dialogues, Psychedelic Justice, Voices from the Global South. Side events including an evening at the Exploratorium (experimental music + psychedelic research), Indigenous delegations from Huni Kuin and Noke Koi Tribe, and a Last Prisoner Project fundraiser. DoubleBlind, covering the conference, noted its deliberate refusal to centre “longevity and optimization” in an era when that framing increasingly dominates the mainstream psychedelic conversation.

Chacruna Institute · DoubleBlind

Harvard: “Can the Rave Still Offer a Periscope Out of the Slop Era?”
On April 8, journalists Emily Witt (The New Yorker) and Michelle Lhooq (Rave New World) spoke at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center on the past, present, and collapsing future of rave utopianism. The talk — part of The Social Life of Psychedelics series — asked whether the dancefloor can still hold the utopian promise it once carried: “In 2026, the drugs are weird, the phones are out, the politics are oppressive, and machine-made music is becoming self-generating.” Lhooq’s framing of rave as a space for grief and transcendence alongside pleasure, and her critique of the “militarisation” of both psychedelics and raving, are threads directly relevant to experience designers and space makers in this field.

Harvard / Mahindra Humanities Center · Rave New World

Trump Signs Psychedelics Executive Order — On the Eve of Bicycle Day (Apr 18)
President Trump signed an executive order on April 18, directing the FDA to issue Commissioner’s National Priority Vouchers to psychedelics with Breakthrough Therapy designations, also directubg ARPA-H to provide match-funding for states’ investments in psychedelics studies. The initial amount mentioned in the order is $50M; and establishing a Right to Try pathway for investigational psychedelic drugs.

Before signing the order, Trump said that he called Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr., as well as other health officials in his administration, about the plans and said there was “uniform support.” “So why would we wait three or four years to get it done?” he continued, “frankly, let’s get it done immediately”.

White House · Psychedelic Alpha

Berkeley’s Altered States Wins Webby for Science & Education — Individual Episode (Apr 23)

The 30th Annual Webby Awards announced its podcast winners late this week, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics took Science & Education, Individual Episode for Season 2, Episode 3 of Altered States: “Is It DMT? Or Is It Heaven?” The episode explores DMT and near-death experience. The Webby ceremony is May 11. The win confirms that psychedelics journalism, when done with the craft of public radio (it’s co-produced with PRX), is reaching mainstream cultural recognition.

BCSP / Altered States · Podnews

Psychedelic art therapy makes the ineffable operational.
Rebecca A. Wilkinson and Alyssa B. Gursky published “Psychedelic Art Therapy: The Intersection of Psychedelics, Creativity, and Art Therapy” in Art Therapy on April 20, 2026. The Psychedelic Art Therapy Network describes psychedelic art therapy as an evolving subdiscipline that combines mechanisms of psychedelic-assisted therapy with the creative process and stage-specific art therapy interventions for preparation, the psychedelic session, and integration. Art can express feelings, images, sensations, and impressions that are difficult to articulate verbally; it can externalize experience into concrete form; and it can create visual anchors that support recall and integration over time.

Taylor & Francis · Psychedelic Art Therapy Network

SPOTLIGHT

Design Week Milan 2026 – Fuorisalone
Milan didn't use the word psychedelic once. It didn't need to. The conversation happening across Fuorisalone 2026 themed “Be the Project” — about neurochemistry, interoception, designing for inner states — was the conversation this field has been having for years, arriving at the world's biggest design event from a completely different direction.

Two things that particularly stood out to me:

"Serotonin — The Chemistry of Happiness" by American Express × Sara Ricciardi
The most directly relevant piece. American Express commissioned artist Sara Ricciardi to translate the scientific concept of the “happiness hormone” serotonin into a physical sensory environment. Set in the loggia of the Pinacoteca di Brera, visitors entered a field of inflatable molecule like forms that gently expanded and contracted, breathing and pulsing like a heart — exploring how beauty can influence emotional and physical responses through rhythm and repetition. Designing around neurochemistry.

Designboom · American Express × Sara Ricciardi

”Pulse Pack, Heart-Sync Bag” by Konel Inc.
An other interesting one, although maybe less obvious is the ”Pulse Pack, Heart-Sync Bag” by Konel Inc., a creative studio operating between Japan, New York, and Milan. The wearable bag that senses the user’s heartbeat and pulses it back at half its frequency, creating an internal rhythm that encourages a moment of pause from external stimuli. The effect is biofeedback made wearable and social: a functional object that becomes a tool for bodily attunement, folding self-awareness into the everyday act of carrying your things.

The question the piece implicitly poses is one the psychedelic field is increasingly asking about space and music and environment: can design itself induce the conditions for interoception?

Konel Inc · Cool Hunting · Fiorisalone

RESEARCH WORTH NOTING

Key Study: Microdosing Psilocybin Improves Quality of Creative Ideas — Not Quantity
Published February 2026 in Neuropharmacology, a mega-analysis led by Luisa Prochazkova at Leiden University pooled data from three double-blind, placebo-controlled trials (N=171) and found that psilocybin microdoses (truffles) increased the originality-to-fluency ratio of divergent thinking — meaning more original ideas relative to total ideas generated — without increasing speed or volume. The mechanism theorized: microdosing relaxes the brain’s top-down pattern reliance, allowing earlier access to remote conceptual associations. A notable placebo effect was observed particularly among prior psychedelic users — raising questions about expectation and creative confidence that are directly useful for designers working in this space.

Neuropharmacology / PubMed · PsyPost

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

The 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards are open for submissions
The world’s first design competition recognising creative excellence in the psychedelic space returns for 2026 — and this year we are going further.

Nine categories. Nine winners. One public choice. Open to designers, studios, researchers, artists, students, and anyone whose work sits at the intersection of psychedelics and creative practice — including work that is psychedelic-informed, shaped by personal experience, even where that experience exists outside current legal frameworks.

This year’s categories: Visual Design & Branding · Storytelling · Music and Sound · Architectural & Space · Art & Photography (new) · Products & Services · Educational & Community Impact · Experimental · Mushroom of the Year (public vote – open for nominations now)

Our 2026 judging panel includes: Cat Nygaard, Design Director at Airbnb and WhatsApp · Hector Pottie, Creative Director for Hitachi Global Brand · Gina Vensel of MAPS · Nutritious, the DJ and producer behind the Psychedelics Design podcast intro · Luke Kirwan, photographer · and Koen Oosterbroek, one of last year’s Awards winner, Founder of Portier and Creative AI Strategist.

Our 2026 first media partners: Design Week · Cool Hunting · Doubleblind · Tricycle Day

Four publications reaching designers, cultural thinkers, and the psychedelic community worldwide <3

Entry period: February — July 2026

Submit Today for $45 · Nominate for “Mushroom Of The Year” · About the Awards

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Elastic Magazine Issue 2: The Interspecies Issue — Coming May 2026
The print magazine of psychedelic art and literature that actively resists Day-Glo nostalgia is publishing its second issue in May. The theme: connections intimate, hostile, symbiotic, and psychic between humans, animals, plants, fungi, and other lifeforms. Issue 1 (The Dying Issue) was a Psychedelics Design Award 2025 finalist for storytelling. Issue 2 will be accompanied by expanded live programming. Founded by Hillary Brenhouse, designed by Chloe Scheffe and Natalie Shields, supported by UC Berkeley / Harvard’s Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative.

Elastic Magazine · Psychedelics Design Winners 2025

Tryp Expo Berlin — May 15–17, Funkhaus Berlin.
TRYP Expo is Europe’s first major gathering at the intersection of psychedelic science, mental health, wellness, and conscious culture. Set inside the iconic Funkhaus Berlin — a sprawling riverside venue known for its legendary acoustics and raw industrial architecture — the festival brings together researchers, practitioners, artists, founders, and curious minds for three days of immersive programming. Alexandra Plesner speaks on Symbiotic Futures alongside Dr. Sam Gandy. Use PSYDESIGNTRYP for 10% off.

Tryp Expo · Plesner · Gandy

Psychedelics Today Founder Joe Moore on Leadership, Integration, and the Psychedelic Landscape
Jen Davenport joins Psychedelics Today to interview co-founder Joe Moore about the growth of Psychedelics Today, the broader psychedelic ecosystem, and how professionals are beginning to engage with psychedelic ideas.

Psychedelics Today Podcast · Davenport · Moore

Contribute to Psy*Design Monthly. If you have research, work, or a perspective that belongs in this newsletter, reach out. This publication is a conversation, not a broadcast.

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Every series has a beginning. A conversation that set the tone for everything that followed. For Psychedelics Design, that conversation was with Bruno Maag with whom I had the honour working on a project whilst I was at the London studio of Method Inc.

Back in 2022, I sat down with Bruno — founder of the renowned Dalton Maag type foundry in London — to ask a question that had been quietly forming in my mind for months: what does colour and typography actually mean in the psychedelic context?

I’d just come back from a conference in Malta, and I’d been watching a wave of startups flood into the space — many of them pre-product but flush with funding — and nearly all of them arriving with one of three visual vocabularies. On one end: dark blues, conservative typefaces, and the studied restraint of a company that wants to be taken seriously by institutional money, whispering “pharmaceutical conglomerate.”

On the other: hyper-saturated, maximalist, a kind of psychedelic party aesthetic that leaned hard into the counterculture associations the serious players were working to distance themselves from. And somewhere in between: a well-meaning but underdeveloped naturalistic look — earthy tones, organic shapes — that gestured at depth without quite landing it from a brand POV.

None of these were wrong, exactly. But none of them felt fully right either. The tension was palpable. These are companies built around one of the most intimate, transformative experiences a human being can have — and their visual identities were struggling to hold that weight. Naturally, when starting anything, branding is mostly an after thought if at all.

To be clear: the industry has come a long way. The past six months alone have brought a noticeable shift in sophistication — brands thinking more carefully about who they’re speaking to, and why design is not decoration but an argument. But to understand where we’re going, it helps to understand where we started. And in 2022, we were very much at the beginning.

Bruno gave me the framework to understand why it was so hard — and what doing it well would actually require. Enjoy the write up!

The Interview That Started It All

Bruno Maag is not someone who deals in vague design intuitions. He’s spent decades at the intersection of neuroscience, typography, and brand strategy — researching how the human brain actually decodes letterforms, what happens when legibility breaks down, and why our emotional response to type is not arbitrary but deeply, evolutionarily conditioned.

His foundry, Dalton Maag, created BBC Reith — the bespoke typeface family now synonymous with the BBC’s global identity. He’s thought seriously about what it means to design for audiences in high-stakes, high-trust contexts. Healthcare is exactly that kind of context. And psychedelics sit squarely within it.

The conversation we had in 2022 covered three interconnected tensions that, in my view, define the visual challenge facing every company operating in this space right now.

Tension 1: Conservative Investors vs. Expansive Experiences

The first tension is structural. The psychedelic industry is caught between two audiences with almost opposite visual expectations.

On one side: institutional investors. Bruno was direct about their influence: “Investors tend to be highly conservative, and therefore you will not want to have anything that would ever want to rock the boat. Big institutional shareholders hold sway.” You speak with restraint, you signal stability, you choose a typeface that reads like a company you would trust with your money — and with your mental health.

On the other: a culturally curious, often countercultural consumer base for whom the sanitised pharma aesthetic feels alienating, even dishonest.

And then there’s the healthcare dimension, which cuts across both. As Bruno put it: “Companies in the medical sector, in general, have to tread quite carefully because you are talking about health, and health is very close to people. This means the branding has to show a degree of seriousness. You can have a degree of creativity, but that is still on a narrow path. You are not sending out a party invitation; you are talking about health and need to convey the feeling of trust.”

The result? A visual compromise that satisfies no one fully. Conservative type choices paired with adventurous icon design — as if the logo itself were trying to have two conversations at once. It’s not incoherence for its own sake; it’s the visual symptom of an industry that hasn’t yet settled its own identity.

Tension 2: Form Follows Function — Even in Branding

Bruno invoked Louis Sullivan’s foundational architectural axiom — form follows function — and applied it to brand design with a precision I found striking. In most branding conversations, aesthetic preference dominates. People like it or they don’t. It looks good or it doesn’t.

Bruno pushed back on that directly: “Mostly as designers, we hear ‘like it / don’t like it’ and ‘looks good / doesn’t look good.’ But if the functionality is poor, you disengage with it emotionally, and if you disengage with it emotionally, you don’t even try to see if you can make the functionality work.” Once emotional engagement is lost, you don’t give the functional content a second chance.

This matters enormously for type. The Grotesk genre — the dominant typographic mode of the space — carries a neutrality that is genuinely useful. It conveys stability. It doesn’t provoke. But Grotesk also has small apertures and closely shaped letterforms, which creates what Bruno calls ambiguity. And on ambiguity, he was unequivocal: “Ambiguity is the enemy of accessibility. The more clear and concise, the easier it is for the brain to decode the individual shapes and the easier it is to extract the meaning.”

The brain expends more effort. Fatigue sets in faster. In a space where you’re communicating with people who may be navigating significant vulnerability — mental health challenges, life transitions, trauma — the cost of that extra cognitive load is not abstract. It’s real.

Bruno also brought in a historical dimension that reframed the whole conversation for me. Typography has always carried cultural meaning — “The advent of advertising in the 1800s started seeing a much wider variety of type styles. We were used to a functional purpose and express different ways to express different things.” Even the Roman Empire understood this, using different letterforms for formal imperial communications versus informal ones. The psychedelic industry didn’t invent the problem of visual signalling. It just inherited it in an unusually charged context.

Tension 3: Accessibility Is Not One Thing

Perhaps the most useful framework Bruno offered was his three-pillar model of accessibility: emotional, functional, and technical — and the insistence that all three must be addressed simultaneously.

He defined emotional accessibility with precision: “Emotional accessibility is the first impression a person experiences when presented with a service or product. Does that person react positively or negatively? Do they feel invited or rejected? Without it, functional and technical accessibility is largely redundant.” In other words, if the design doesn’t emotionally invite someone in, the rest is moot.

Functional accessibility is about legibility and cognitive load — the effort required to decode information without fatigue. Technical accessibility covers the engineering layer: how a typeface renders across different screens and environments. These aren’t separate checkboxes. As Bruno described it, think of a Venn diagram — “in the middle of it, you have the sweet spot.”

On icon design specifically, he was sharp. Looking at how complex logos have become compared to the work of Paul Rand and Saul Bass in the 1950s and 60s, he noted: “Everything was much more stylised back then. Simple without being simplistic. It could work in different environments without losing any of the brand messaging. The moment it goes small, the design collapses.”

That last line landed hard when I first heard it. And looking at the psychedelic landscape, it still holds. Most brands are optimising for one pillar at the expense of the others — emotionally ambitious designs sometimes sacrifice functional clarity, functional stalwarts sacrifice warmth, and very few are asking the technical questions at all.

What This Means for the Industry

I published this interview in 2022 because I believed the psychedelic industry was at a visual crossroads. It was still early enough that identity could be shaped deliberately — that the sector could choose to build a visual language worthy of the experiences and the people it was claiming to serve.

Three years later, some things have shifted. We’ve seen more sophisticated brand refreshes, a movement away from pure pharma pastiche, and a growing recognition that design is not decoration — it’s a functional investment in trust.

But the core challenge Bruno articulated hasn’t gone away. These are companies working in the territory of mental health. Their audience may be vulnerable. Their investors may be conservative. Their products are, in many cases, still fighting for cultural legitimacy (not to mention legality). Every typographic decision they make is making an argument — about safety, about credibility, about who belongs in the conversation.

Bruno’s parting thought from that 2022 conversation has stayed with me: “There’s an evolutionary reason for our immediate emotional response to specific visual shapes and forms. Everyday decisions will always be taken on an emotional basis first.”

Design is not a nice-to-have. It is the first argument a brand makes. And in psychedelics, that argument had better be worth listening to.

Read the Full Interview

The full conversation — including first looks at specific psychedelic brands, Bruno’s breakdown of colour accessibility, and his take on why the industry’s icon design tends to collapse at small scale — is available in the original piece:

👉 Bruno Maag on fonts, form, and psychedelic identity

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

It’s an honour to share that Zoe Wilder joined us as a strategic advisor!

Named “Cannabis Empressaria” by Forbes, “35 Most Influential Women in Cannabis” by Entrepreneur Magazine and recipient of the 2024 Green Market Report Award for Public Relations, Zoe Wilder is a public relations professional specializing in lifestyle, culture and wellness.

For over 20 years, Zoe has worked with hundreds of clients across a variety of industries to develop and execute inventive promotional content and campaigns that capture the attention of tastemakers and influencers from around the globe. Zoe holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the College of William & Mary and a Master of Social Work from Fordham University.

Her team comprises over 50 years of forward thinking and purpose driven public relations expertise working with A-list celebrities, New York Times bestsellers, award winning film, television, radio, music, and consumer products, critically acclaimed podcasts, top brands and business leaders, and publishing oversight for several of the world’s leading peer-reviewed medical journals.

A founding member of DoubleBlind Magazine, a media company covering the expansion of psychedelics around the globe, she also launched Liquid Culture, a revolutionary record label and artist collective redefining the intersection of music, visual art, and cultural innovation. Beyond that, she’s an ambassador for the Last Prisoner Project and Success Centers, advocating for justice and community empowerment; a strategic advisor at Psychedelics Design; and a member of the Association For Electronic Music.

We are in the midst of co-curating the upcoming online awards and event – and much more. Stay tuned!

Find Zoe on:
LinkedIn • Instagram • Zoe Wilder Public Relations • Liquid Culture Records

FROM OUR PARTNERS

• Mabel at TRYP Expo – A Dialogue on Microdosing Beyond the Hype
At TRYP EXPO, Pernille Brostrup (Founder of Mabel Life and Advisor Psychedelics Design) and Amir Lotfi, PhD (former Atai & Beckley Psytech) take you inside the reality of microdosing. Beyond the hype, into what actually shifts in the brain and body.
Mabel Life is redefining how we approach wellbeing, combining science, mindfulness and guided microdosing protocols designed to support clarity, emotional balance and personal growth. Join uns May 15-17, in Berlin, Germany! Use code PSYDESIGNTRYP to get 10% off your ticket.

The first four months of 2026 have posed a design question that keeps me up at night: when an entire field decides to shed its identity and reach for institutional legibility, what gets lost in the translation — and does it matter?

This issue is an attempt to sit with that tension — between psychedelic origin and pharmaceutical ambition, between counterculture and clinic — and look at what it's producing visually, linguistically, and culturally. That, as far as I'm concerned, is the design story of this moment.

DESIGN & CREATIVITY

The science of creativity is catching up to what designers have always suspected — and the tools, institutions, and aesthetic movements shifting around us are making the conversation urgent.

Microdosing psilocybin improves the quality of creative ideas — but not the quantity
A mega-analysis pooling data from three double-blind, placebo-controlled trials (N=171) led by Luisa Prochazkova at Leiden University found that psilocybin microdoses improved the quality (originality-to-fluency ratio) of divergent thinking without increasing the speed or volume of ideas generated. The researchers theorize that microdosing relaxes the brain’s top-down pattern reliance, allowing earlier access to remote conceptual associations — which, if you work creatively, sounds less like a pharmacological effect and more like a description of a good working state. A notable placebo effect was also observed, particularly among prior psychedelic users, which raises its own questions about expectation and creative confidence. PsyPost / Neuropharmacology

Brain networks behind scientific creative thinking mapped for the first time
A Penn State neuroimaging study scanned 47 STEM students in the act of generating novel hypotheses and found that scientific creative thinking recruits the same three networks involved in general creativity — the default mode network, the salience network, and a semantic control region — with cross-network communication increasing precisely as within-network activity decreases. What’s notable for designers isn’t just the brain science: it’s the suggestion that the conditions for creative insight are structural, not exceptional. The researchers argue the findings could reshape how STEM curricula are designed — a reminder that education is always also a design problem. PsyPost / Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

Imaginarium — the first scientific conference on psychedelics and creativity
In January 2026, UC San Diego's Center for MINDS and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination co-hosted what may be the first academic conference dedicated specifically to psychedelics and creativity — featuring artists Alex and Allyson Grey, multimedia journalist Hamilton Morris, and psychedelic comedian Shane Mauss alongside researchers. The framing was pointed: clinical psychedelic research is accelerating, but imagination and creativity are being left behind as scientific priorities. For designers, this is the academic world catching up to a conversation the creative community has been having for years — and it signals that creativity is becoming a legitimate scientific object of study in its own right, not merely a side effect of therapy. District216 / UCSD

REBRAND RADAR

Something has shifted. In the first quarter of 2026, the psychedelic sector executed a series of corporate rebrands — and the visual logic is unmistakable. Companies that built their identity around the language of psychedelia are mostly replacing it with Latinized, pharmaceutical-grade nomenclature: abstract, authoritative, legible to regulators and institutional investors alike. This feels like a statement about where these companies believe they belong.

MindMed → Definium Therapeutics (effective January 2026)
The most prominent rebrand of the quarter. Mind Medicine dropped its explorer-era identity and relaunched as Definium Therapeutics, a compound of two Latin roots: definio (to define, to bound — scientific precision) and infinitum (openness to possibility). The company enters 2026 with three Phase 3 readouts of its LSD-derived compound DT120 expected within the year. Business Wire

Cybin → Helus Pharma (effective January 2026)
Cybin rebranded as Helus Pharma and simultaneously moved from NYSE American to Nasdaq. The name is pronounced “Heal Us” — an unusually direct therapeutic declaration. The company rang the Nasdaq opening bell with the new brand displayed in Times Square. Its lead program HLP003 (deuterated psilocybin analog) carries FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation for major depressive disorder. Helus Pharma IR

Mydecine Innovations Group → Noveris Health Sciences (effective February 2026)
Quiet but telling: the Canadian psychedelic biotech swapped both its name and ticker (MYCO → NVRS on the CSE). No detailed rationale was disclosed, but Noveris — suggesting novelty and a broader health sciences orientation — continues the sector-wide pattern of erasing psychedelic-specific nomenclature. Newsfile Corp

Entheon Biomedical → STRYK Brands (announced January 2026, pending)
Entheon Biomedical represents an outlier in this group. Rather than evolving its position within psychedelic medicine, the company is pivoting away from the sector entirely. Following a proposed reverse takeover by nutraceutical company Nutravisor, Entheon is expected to rebrand as STRYK Brands, shifting its focus toward consumer performance health products. Where others are moving toward clinical models, Entheon is repositioning closer to the consumer wellness and performance space. Newsfile Corp / Entheon

atai Life Sciences + Beckley Psytech → AtaiBeckley (merger closed November 2025; fully active Q1 2026)
The merger-driven rebrand: two established players combined into a single identity that honors both legacies. AtaiBeckley enters 2026 with BPL-003 (5-MeO-DMT intranasal spray) heading toward Phase 3, financial runway into 2029, and a place on the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index. AtaiBeckley

Carhart-Harris Lab (new branding and website launch, January 2026)
At a moment when much of the psychedelic field is adopting the visual language of traditional pharma — clean, restrained, and clinical — the Carhart-Harris Lab moves in a different direction.

The academic collective led by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris at UCSF recently launched a new website and identity that feels closer to culture and art than institutional science. A full-bleed black background, a deep crimson radial bloom, and a stark all-caps wordmark create a system that is both minimal and expressive. At its centre sits a simple orbital form — a circle bisected by a fine line — reading as neuron, sun, lens, and psychedelic orb at once.

The tagline, “Science at the edge. Therapy in the making.”, reflects the system precisely: a space still in formation, where research and application meet. In a field negotiating its place between counterculture and clinic, the lab suggests that scientific credibility does not have to come at the expense of aesthetic risk. carhartharrislab.com
Disclosure: branding by Alexandra Plesner, author of this newsletter.

Mission Within Foundation → Mission to Live Foundation (effective March 2026)
The foundation that funds psychedelic therapy scholarships for veterans and first responders has rebranded while fully adopting the new name and identity. The name change does real linguistic work: from the blunt urgency of survivalist language to something more introspective and therapeutic. Less emergency, more invitation — a reframe that mirrors the shift happening across the broader psychedelic sector, but arrived at through mission rather than market pressure. missiontolivefoundation.org
Disclosure: brand identity co-designed by Alexandra Plesner and Marissa Feinberg, founder of Triple Bottom Why and PSYCA.

The naming pattern across Definium, Helus, and Noveris is worth sitting with. These are pharmaceutical names — Latin roots, no psychedelic associations, nothing that signals origin. In design terms, it’s a classic brand maturity move: the challenger phase gives way to the institutional phase. The question is whether anything essential gets lost in translation.

SPOTLIGHT

Blossom → More Blossom (new website and logo relaunch, April 2026)
Blossom has become More Blossom—and this is what a serious relaunch looks like.

The platform now positions itself as a “unified intelligence layer” for psychedelic research. That shift could have felt inflated. It doesn’t. The product and the design both carry the weight.

The new mark is a geometric red-orange symbol: two interlocking B-forms that read as data intersection and organic growth. It’s restrained, legible, and does the job across scales. The broader design language follows through—clean, structured, and confident in complexity.

One of the most considered relaunches I’ve seen in years. I asked Floris a few questions to get closer to how this came together:

Why rebuild?
”Blossom had been running on WordPress for over seven years. It served us well, but the database had outgrown what plugins could handle. I rebuilt the entire platform from scratch on a modern stack (Sanity, Next.js, Vercel) so the data architecture could actually match what researchers and organisations need: structured metadata across 2,500+ papers, trials, compounds, stakeholders, and more. It was a solo project on the development side, though I've had collaborators on content and analysis over the years.”

What changed?
”Everything, really. The database is deeper and more connected. You can now explore research by compound, country, topic, or stakeholder, and cross-reference between them. There are new tools like the Atlas (a visual research landscape map), a research network showing co-authorship links, outcome data comparisons, and monthly research recaps.”

Identity shift?
”The old Blossom mark had done its job, but it looked like it belonged to the WordPress era. The new identity is cleaner and more confident. The “B” icon works at small sizes (favicons, avatars), the wordmark is set in Caladea, and the colour palette centres on a bold orange. It reflects where the platform is now: less blog, more intelligence layer.”

Check out the new platform and experience awe: moreblossom.com

RESEARCH WORTH NOTING

Compass Pathways Phase 3 — the quarter's most significant clinical milestone. Compass Pathways' Phase 3 COMP006 trial of COMP360 (synthetic psilocybin) met its primary endpoint in treatment-resistant depression, showing a statistically significant 3.8-point MADRS reduction vs. control, with effects beginning the day after administration — the company is targeting an NDA submission in Q4 2026 and a potential 2027 launch. BioPharma Dive For readers who want the full research and regulatory picture — Phase 2 results, DEA quota changes, policy developments across states — The Microdose and Blossom cover that terrain with depth and rigor; this newsletter will point you there rather than duplicate their work.

Mind FLUX — the first study designed for real-world creative problem solving
Led by Dr. Manesh Girn, Dr. Manoj Doss and Dr. Greg Fonzo at the University of Charmaine & Gordon McGill Center for Psychedelic Research & Therapy with the Center for MINDS, Mind FLUX is the first controlled psilocybin study built specifically to test processing fluency — the mental state most directly linked to creative insight and flexible thinking — across three phases: a survey of innovators, an fMRI clinical study, and real-world application with professionals testing psilocybin's effect on actual creative work rather than proxy tasks like brick uses. This matters to designers precisely because it moves the research object from the lab abstraction to the thing itself. Dr. Girn is also a confirmed speaker at the Psychedelics Design Conference in November this year. Read the full article by our friend and collaborator Dennis Walker on Lucid News

NEWS FROM PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN

Speaking at Tryp Expo Berlin — May 15–17, Funkhaus Berlin. Alexandra Plesner will be on stage at Tryp Expo — Europe's newest psychedelic science and wellness gathering — alongside Dr. Sam Gandy in a talk on Symbiotic Futures. Use PSYDESIGNTRYP for 10% off your ticket <3

Psychedelics Design Monthly launches today. This is the first issue of what will be a monthly digest — each edition covering the most significant developments in design culture, creative practice, and visual identity across the psychedelic field. Thank you for being here from the start.

The 2026 Psychedelics Design Awards are open. The world's first design competition recognising creative excellence in the psychedelic space returns for 2026 — across eight categories including Visual Design & Branding, Storytelling, Audio Experience, Architectural & Space, and Mushroom of the Year. Open to designers, studios, researchers, artists, and students. Submit your work

Research study open: “Psychedelics and the Creative Process.” We are conducting ongoing research into how designers, artists, and makers experience the relationship between psychedelics and their creative work. If you work in a creative field and have something to contribute, we want to hear from you. Details at www.psychedelics.design/survey If you are interested in a partnership, please do get in touch via info@psychedelics.design

Contribute to Psy*Design Monthly. If you have research, work, or a perspective that belongs in this newsletter, reach out. This publication is a conversation, not a broadcast.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Music for Mushrooms, a narrative feature documentary by last year’s speaker and judge East Forest exploring music, ceremony, and inner healing, is now available for a limited time on YouTube.

Nutritious, a NYC-raised cultural alchemist — artist, DJ, producer, and A&R at Liquid Culture Records — has just released Freefall, a three-track EP featuring “Freefall,” “Freefall” (Chill Mix), and “Spiral.” Centered on the themes of love, passion, and faith, the EP explores the exquisite vertigo of surrendering to a force that pulls harder than the earth itself — a coordinate in the deep atmosphere where the weight of control dissolves, leaving only the rush of the descent. Nutritious is also the creative mind behind our exclusive podcast intro.

“Nutritious has delivered a kaleidoscopic, high-fidelity journey that feels like a vivid, iridescent dream. It is, quite simply, one of the most immersive listening experiences of the year.” — Psychedelics Design

We are looking for partners and sponsors for the 2026 Psychedelics Design Festival & Awards, with a global audience of designers, researchers, creatives, and practitioners working at the intersection of psychedelics and creative culture. If your organisation wants to reach this community — whether in research, clinical environments, brand strategy, education, or creative practice — we would love to hear from you. Get in touch

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We’re excited to announce the first details for next year’s online conference on psychedelics and creativity, taking place November 6–7, 2026. Below, you’ll find early information on speakers, the program, and registration — with more updates coming soon.

And yes: the Psychedelic Design Awards return, celebrating creative excellence across the field.

THEME: Creative Biome

Our 2026 theme explores psychedelics and creativity as a shared ecosystem — living forces shaping culture, care, and future possibility.

How might design be felt beyond form and function?
How can creativity rooted in psychedelic experience support personal and planetary wellbeing?
And how do we integrate insight from two inspiring days back into our everyday lives?

CONFIRMED SPEAKER

Dennis Walker – Founder of Mycopreneur & Co-Founder of Mycoday

Zoe Wilder – Founder Zoe Wilder Public Relations & Liquid Culture Records

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris – Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry Head of Carhart-Harris Lab, University of California San Francisco

Dr. Manesh Girn – Postdoctoral Neuroscientist, University of California, Scientific Advisor and Content Creator The Psychedelic Scientist

Jess Jorgensen – Founder of Sporesight

Dr. Jahan Khamsehzadeh – Author & Psychedelic Scholar

Cullen Clark – Founder of Aether Apothecary & Founder of Lost Muti

Dr. Rayyan Zafar – Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology Imperial College London

Marissa Feinberg – Founder of Psychedelics for Climate Action

CONFIRMED JUDGES

Judges include leaders in design, science, media, law, and psychedelic culture:

• Cat Nygaard – Design Director Airbnb

• Hector Pottie – Creative Director for Hitachi Brand, Global Corporate Brand & Communications, Hitachi

• Gina Vensel – Co-founder of Plant Media Project and Director of Media & Community Partnerships, Psychedelic Science 2025

• Zoe Wilder – Founder Zoe Wilder Public Relations & Liquid Culture Records

• Jordan Gruber, J.D., M.A. – Writer, Editor, Practitioner & CEO of Enlightenment.Com

• Graham Pechenik – Founding Partner & Registered Patent Attorney at Calyx Law

• Tracy DeLuca – Founder of How Might We Design

• Carla Palette – Brand Designer & Art Director

• Jalen Salazar – Strategic Advisor, Altered-States Innovator, and Psychedelic Sherpa

• Dr. Jahan Khamsehzadeh – Author & Psychedelic Scholar

• Jess Jorgensen – Founder of Sporesight

• Kevin Farnham – Co-Founder of Kei

• Dr. Rayyan Zafar – Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology

• Koen Oosterbroek – Founder Portier & Creative / AI Strategist – WINNER OF THE 2025 AWARDS CATEGORY PRODUCTS & SERVICES

• Nutritious – Artist, A&R at Liquid Culture, Founding team member of DoubleBlind Magazine

• Dr. Mendel Kaelen – Founder of Wavepaths

PARTNER WITH US

Interested in collaborating or supporting the event?
Share a little information and we’ll be in touch:

https://www.psychedelics.design/contact

STUDENT ACCESS SPONSOR NEEDED

Help us make the Psychedelic Design Awards accessible to all. We’re seeking sponsors to support:

• free submissions for students

• free event access

• a new scholarship fund

Your contribution directly empowers the next generation of creative thinkers.

https://www.psychedelics.design/contact

ABOUT THE AWARDS

The Psychedelics Design Awards highlight innovation, creativity, and cultural impact across the psychedelic ecosystem. In a field facing regulatory and cultural challenges, the awards aim to uplift work that moves the space toward compassion, insight, and possibility — with a touch of humor about ego, recognition, and the creative journey.

PRE-SALE

Submit early for $45 and edit your submission if necessary later.
(Pre-sale is only available until February 1st, 2026).

ENTER TODAY

CATEGORIES

• Architectural & Interior Visions

• Art [new]

• Experimental

• Educational & Community Impact

• Music

• Products & Services

• Storytelling

• Visual Design & Branding

• “Mushroom of the Year” – the only free and nomination only category (public voting)

LISTEN: Gianni Masciopinto - Future Proof Branding, Designers at the Psychedelic Frontier

Designer Gianni Masciopinto—winner of the 2025 awards—joins us to discuss speculative branding at the edge of legality and cultural transformation. Gianni shares why he left a secure design role to launch a solo studio, and how a fictional psychedelic chocolate concept sparked real-world recognition and collaboration.

We explore emotional intelligence in brand strategy, the tension between intuition and structure, and the role of time, meditation, and regeneration in the creative process. The conversation asks a timely question: What does responsible branding look like in emerging, stigmatized, or transformative industries like psychedelics?

WATCH: talks from the 2024 and 2025 conferences and events

Talks, panels, and highlights at the intersection of psychedelics, creativity, and design. From conference keynotes to curated external content, explore how altered states open new perspectives on creativity, design, and culture.

https://www.psychedelics.design/videos-library

Take part in what may be the first-ever design research survey (anonymous) exploring how psychedelic substances influence the creative process.

✅ 14 questions ✅ No writing required ✅ Just choose & click ⏱ Takes 5-8 minutes

TAKE THE SURVEY

Thank you for being part of this evolving intersection.

Welcome to Psychedelics Design – where design meets psychedelics!

In this episode, we sit down with Gianni Masciopinto, winner of the Psychedelics Design Award 2025 for his speculative chocolate brand and packaging concept — a project that challenges stigma while pointing toward a more mature, emotionally intelligent future of psychedelic consumer branding.

Gianni shares the story behind founding his solo studio in 2024, leaving a secure design role, and taking a risk by creating work in a legally gray space. That leap became a catalyst for conversations, collaborations, and now recognition across the psychedelic design landscape.

We explore how emotional intelligence, authenticity, and strategic boundaries shape the design process — and why regeneration, meditation, time, and embodied practice matter as much as typography, visual identity, and business outcomes.

The conversation moves through fear, creative vulnerability, and the dance between intuition and structure — toward a deeper question: What does responsible branding look like in emerging, stigmatized, or transformational industries like psychedelics?

Key Takeaways from the Episode

1. Speculative design moves culture
Gianni’s psychedelic chocolate brand was meant to signal possibility, spark dialogue, and model what a mature psychedelic product could look like. Speculative work can open real-world doors.

2. Emotional strategy belongs at the core of branding
Gianni uses an “emotional lock and key” framework to understand audience fears or skepticism, then designs a response that builds trust and connection — pairing heart with commercial outcomes.

3. Time + space are essential creative tools
Meditation, stepping away, and returning with fresh eyes consistently produce better work. Pressure and constraints can sharpen thinking, but rest expands perspective.

4. Fear is part of entrepreneurship — and sometimes the portal
Launching a studio and attaching it publicly to psychedelics invited risk, stigma, and doubt — but also attracted aligned clients, opportunities, and curiosity. “Shoot your shot.”

5. Design ethics must expand beyond humans
The discussion pointed toward regenerative, post-human design: What if nature is a stakeholder in the brand system? How do we design responsibly within ecosystems affected by consumption?

Also on Spotify and Apple.

About Gianni Masciopinto

Gianni Masciopinto is a brand identity designer, founder, and creative strategist who blends design with purpose to help businesses connect more deeply with their audiences. He is passionate about building brands that feel meaningful and human — not just visually striking — and is known for his optimism about how AI and emerging tools can amplify creativity while preserving soul and intent.

As a founder and thinker, he partners with purpose-driven organizations to shape identity systems that resonate emotionally and strategically, translating values into visual language and experience. His work sits at the crossroads of beautiful design, thoughtful strategy, and forward-looking technology — helping clients articulate who they are in ways that feel authentic and memorable.

Connect with Gianni Online

• LinkedIn

• Instagram

• Website

One of the most well-known principles in psychedelic work is “set and setting” — your mindset going in, and the environment you’re in when the experience unfolds.

This idea comes not from Silicon Valley biohackers, but from researchers and elders dating back to the 1950s. And it’s held up across time, therapy rooms, festivals, and ceremonies around the world.

Think of it like this: your mindset is the lens, and your setting is the stage. Together, they shape the show.

INTRODUCING

Sporesight is a new way of thinking, inspired by nature’s intelligence. Through speaking, insight and impact, we’re on a mission to shape better ways to do business, for regenerative futures. Founder, Jess Jorgensen, will be speaking at next year’s annual online conference and will also join the panel of judges for the upcoming awards. We’re honored!

Mindset: What You Bring In

Your emotional tone, thoughts, expectations, and intentions influence how the journey unfolds. This isn’t about “positive vibes only.” It’s about honesty and readiness.

Ask yourself:

• What’s been living in my mind lately? Grief, stress, excitement?

• Do I feel stable and supported, or stretched thin and depleted?

• Am I hoping for something specific, or am I open to the unknown?

• Am I approaching this to escape, to heal, to explore, or to create?

There are no right answers. The goal is awareness, not control.

Setting: What Surrounds You

Your environment is not a backdrop. It actively shapes your nervous system. Psychedelics amplify what’s already present, so design your space with intention.

Consider:

• Lighting: Soft, adjustable, warm.

• Sound: A curated playlist, ambient soundscape, or silence. Pre-download if needed.

• Comfort: Blankets, pillows, soft textures, supportive seating or lying space.

• Objects: Meaningful items like books, art, natural objects, journals.

• Scent: Incense, essential oils, or simply fresh air.

• Practical needs: Water, snacks, tissues, easy bathroom access.

This is environmental design, directed toward the psyche.

Digital and Emotional Setting

• Put your phone away. If you need it for music or safety, silence everything else.

• Clear your schedule afterward. Experiences unfold in waves.

• Let someone know. A friend or sitter provides a relational anchor.

Ritual as Interface

Small rituals (lighting a candle, writing an intention, one deep breath) mark the transition into a meaningful state. It’s not about being spiritual. It’s design for the mind: a cue that this moment matters.

A Brief Lineage

Indigenous traditions such as Amazonian ayahuasca ceremonies and ancient Soma rites have long emphasized careful preparation and communal context. In the 1960s, Timothy Leary and later Norman Zinberg articulated set and setting as foundational not just to psychedelics, but to how all psychoactive experiences take shape. Today, research continues to show that mindset and environment strongly influence insight, emotional processing, and integration.

Beyond Psychedelics

Designing environments that support sensitivity and flow

Now, here is a thought: if psychedelics amplify what’s already happening in the mind and environment, so do certain nervous systems just by the way they’re wired.

Highly sensitive people (and we would argue most creatives) naturally experience the world with a heightened nervous system. They feel more, notice more, process more. Elaine Aron famously called this the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Whether or not someone identifies with the term, the reality is the same: sensitivity is a perceptual style. And it means the environment always matters.

If psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, then a sensitive nervous system is a constant amplifier. Noise, light, emotional tone in a room, clutter, social dynamics, even the texture of clothing can shift everything from mood to cognition.

So it’s worth designing the everyday setting with the same care we give a psychedelic session.

If you’re looking for books, research databases, podcasts, films, or playlists, explore our free education section on the website. It’s a curated rabbit hole for curious minds.

Listen: Plasticity, the Role of Set and Setting, and the Influence of Psychedelics

Dr. Robin Carhart‑Harris on the intersections of environment, neural plasticity, and psychedelics — from the Psychedelics Today podcast.

Video: Psychedelics as Nature Connection Catalysts

Dr. Sam Gandy, ecologist and psychedelic researcher, speaks about how environment — especially nature — acts as a co-creator in psychedelic journeys.

Take part in what may be the first-ever design research survey (anonymous) exploring how psychedelic substances influence the creative process.

If you’d like, you can also leave your email in a separate form for a chance to win a free ticket to our next online conference.

✅ 14 questions
✅ No writing required
✅ Just choose & click
⏱ Takes 5-8 minutes

Take the survey: https://www.psychedelics.design/survey

Thank you for being part of this evolving intersection.

INTERESTING READS & NEWS

Can psychedelics heal the mind without harming nature?
There are important ecological concerns related to the sourcing of psychedelic plants and animals. The rising popularity of psychedelics has put pressure on endangered species used in traditional rituals, such as peyote cactus, ayahuasca vine, iboga, and the Sonoran Desert toad. This has raised ethical and conservation issues, prompting calls for sustainable harvesting practices, cultivation efforts (e.g., cultivating psilocybin mushrooms), synthetic production of psychedelic compounds, and respect for Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices that have long honored these natural medicines.

By Rhett Ayers Butler, October 2025, ButlerNature.com

Microdosing psilocybin and its effect on creativity: Lessons learned from three double-blind placebo controlled longitudinal trials
Notably, microdosing (taking very small doses of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin) is under close investigation for its alleged cognitive and creative benefits, albeit findings are still emerging and the phenomenon remains partly anecdotal.

By Luisa Prochazkova, Josephine Marschall, Michiel van Elk, Ben D. Rifkin, Neil R. Schon, Donatella Fiacchino, George Fejer, Martin Kuchar, Bernhard Hommel, November 2025

Psychedelics may not boost creativity as widely believed, new study suggests
While users often report feeling more inspired and insightful, some studies show that these subjective experiences do not always translate into improved performance on standard creativity tests. For instance, formulations like DMT/harmine were seen to enhance feelings of creative insight while impairing structured problem-solving skills, indicating a possible mismatch between perceived and actual creative output.

By by Eric W. Dolan, September 2025, PsyPost

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Psychedelic Research Links 2025 by Blossom

A comprehensive overview of all psychedelic research that has come out this year. We cover the research per month and provide a one-sentence summary for each new publication. After the full summary is added, a link to Blossom’s review is added to the papers included in our database.

https://blossomanalysis.com/psychedelic-research-links-2025/