Editor’s Note
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.
Submit Your Work. Only $45.
The world’s first design competition recognising creative excellence in the psychedelic space is open — and the window is closing. If you or someone you know has created work at the intersection of psychedelics and design, culture, sound, space, or storytelling, this is the moment.
Nine categories. One public choice. Open to designers, studios, researchers, artists, students, and anyone whose work sits in this field — including work shaped by personal experience, even where that experience exists outside current legal frameworks.
Visual Design & Branding | Storytelling | Music & Sound | Architectural & Space | Art & Photography | Products & Services | Educational & Community | Experimental | Mushroom of the Year
Entry period: February — July 2026 · $45 to submit
Nominations for Mushroom of the Year are free and open now: psychedelics.design/awards
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.
• 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.
PSYCHEDELIC CREATIVITY RESEARCH
Have you ever experienced a creative breakthrough during a psychedelic journey?
We are inviting healthy volunteers (18+) to take part in an online survey study exploring the connection between psychedelics and creativity. If you’ve had such an experience and would like to contribute to cutting-edge research, we’d love to hear from you.
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.
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:
• 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
A question to take into the week, pulled from Josh Rubin’s Substack:
“Think of a hard thing you have already come through. Not the one you are in now—an earlier one, where you can see the shape clearly. What did it clarify? What frequency of yours became visible only after you came out the other side?”
Josh Rubin
Know a designer, creative director, or agency working adjacent to this space? Forward this to one person who should be reading it.
“The context is the medicine” reads as a lovely slogan until you set it next to the other phrase in this issue, that psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers. Then it stops being a metaphor and becomes pharmacology.
A non-specific amplifier is the field’s own admission that the molecule has no fixed effect of its own. It raises the gain on whatever signal is already in the room. So the context is not simply a modifier of the drug effect. For a true amplifier, the context is the signal and the drug is the gain. The therapeutic content cannot be coming from the compound alone, because the compound carries none of its own fixed meaning. It comes from the body, the expectation, the room, the relationship, and the story the experience is later placed in. That does not make the biology less real. It makes the biology less lonely.
Which is why the Damasio thread matters as more than a nod to feeling. If feeling is how the organism maps its own condition rather than a layer added after cognition, then set and setting are not the soft surround of the intervention. They are part of its physiology, a causal organ of the dose rather than its packaging.
And that sharpens the regulatory worry. A regime that standardizes the molecule, dose, purity, contraindications, while leaving the relational field unspecified is standardizing the gain and ignoring the signal. It regulates the component that carries no therapeutic meaning by itself and leaves undertheorized the part where much of the difference lives.
That is where the Benjamin aura paper and the Silicon Valley worry become the same worry. Optimization framing does not merely rebrand the experience. It changes the signal being amplified, and therefore changes the medicine, not just the marketing.
Read that way, your line about the designer as the witness who gives the experience form stops being a role and becomes a mechanism. If context is the signal, the designer is not decorating the treatment. They are composing part of its active dose.