Editor’s Note
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.
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.
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
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"This I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear."
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.
With all the excitement — and there is a lot of it right now — it's worth pausing. This is not candy floss. These are powerful tools, and how we design around them, with them, and for them matters enormously.
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