Information
Welcome to the wonderful world of Studio Phantastica. This space represents the culmination of five and a half years of my doctoral research into the spatialities and space-making practices of contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy.
As a living extension of the research-creation practices that inform my exegesis, this website functions as a tool for space-makers, professional designers, everyday designers, spatial thinkers, psychonauts, and therapy providers. Whether you are a formally trained architect or an everyday space-maker, this platform is for anyone actively engaged in shaping environments for psychedelic care.
When you explore the main page, you will encounter a series of floating fields of colour. These are what I call 'offerings for practice' - critical orientations that have emerged through my research as deeply important ideas for space-making. Representing my core contribution to design practice, these offerings are intended to provoke new ways of thinking about the spaces and spatial practices associated with psychedelic-assisted therapy. By clicking on each offering, a pop-up box will reveal its central provocation.
Mapped across these fluid offerings is a radial dial of sixteen distinct projects, illustrating the fullness of the creative outcomes generated over the course of this work. Each number opens into a specific undertaking, taking you to a project page that contains more information about its context, timing, and execution, along with the photographs, sketches, and writings produced along the way.
This interface can be navigated in multiple ways. You can explore projects directly through the dial, or click on specific offerings to see their directly associated projects rendered in colour. Alternatively, you can navigate using the three design approaches located on the top navigation ribbon. These approaches act as frameworks for engaging with the offerings and projects:
Practice
This approach asks how your design practice itself can become inherently psychedelic, moving across different perceptual registers while navigating the practical realities of our work.
Sites
This approach explores where design might actively intervene within the psychedelic-assisted therapy assemblage and across the psychedelic surround to support the therapeutic encounter.
Materials
This is an approach to designing that asks us to rethink our assumptions about the physical world, treating the materiality of space-making as a vibrant, precarious ecology that actively participates in the therapeutic experience.
These offerings, design approaches, project outcomes, and creative practices are intended to sit alongside the central concept developed during my PhD research: the psychedelic surround. I developed this term to articulate the field of multi-temporal and multi-sited spatial conditions that emerge alongside the psychedelic-assisted therapy encounter (Conrick, 2026, p. 8). Reading these elements together expands our understanding of what is both designed and designable within the context of contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Thank you for taking the time to explore my work.
Projects
01
Collected Comforts
02
Caritas Christi
03
Sinking/Feeling
04
Scrim
05
Doing Research Together
06
PsiConnect
07
Experiments in Walking
08
Dermographies
09
PSIKEA: Extending the Sensorium
10
Impressions
11
Asanapy
12
The In-between
13
Swinburne
14
Encountering Atmospheric Elements
15
The Tomorrow Party
16
Tanglework
Thresholding
An active, porous approach to boundary-making.
As spatial practitioners, thresholding challenges us to move our practice fluidly across different registers of perception and space. It asks us to design conditions that "perform, reshape, [and] constrain in ways unforeseeable" (Manning, 2014) throughout our work. By embracing this orientation, we take on the vital task of facilitating complex transitions. We can deliberately mediate the manifold edges and territories that meet within the psychedelic encounter - the conscious and the unconscious, the inside and the outside, the psychedelic and the non-psychedelic. This approach asks us to become deeply sensitive to how these territories relate, urging us to design for their crossings and interpenetrations.
Weirdness
Engage in a deliberate practice of weirdness.
As spatial designers, we can harness the ambient strangeness inherent in the psychedelic surround, using the weird not just as an aesthetic outcome, but as an active methodology. Drawing on the work of Mark Fisher, this orientation asks us to use the weird as a lens focused on the "conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together" (Fisher, 2016). By actively designing for unexpected juxtapositions - much like the montage-driven practices of the surrealists - we can architect environments that authentically hold and celebrate the innate weirdness of the psychedelic experience itself.
Tactical Alliances
Activate informal relational networks.
As spatial practitioners designing in highly regulated contexts, we know that formal medical infrastructure often creates intense friction. When we hit these institutional roadblocks, we have to leverage our relationships to actually get things done. We can build shared workarounds and engage deeply with the people on the ground. By leaning on these relational infrastructures, we sustain the momentum of our practice in the face of bureaucratic 'trouble', building collaborative coalitions that help us navigate complex systems together.
Safety × Discomfort
There is a productive tension between safety and discomfort in 'safe spaces'.
Discomfort emerges in so many ways within the psychedelic surround. Most obviously, the psychedelic drug experience itself has the capacity to be both physically and psychologically uncomfortable. As queer theorists and safety scholars show us, discomfort is also implicit the moment we engage with bodies and experiences that are not our own. A truly safe spatial encounter requires the creation of spaces that are safe for every-body: and so a meaningful diversity of embodied and emplaced experiences must inform our space-making practices. As spatial practitioners, we can embrace the discomfort inherent in the construction of 'safe spaces'and advocate for environments that can hold these frictions rather than trying to erase them.
Care
A call to design for the caregiver.
As spatial practitioners, we need to return our focus to the physical and operational realities of the practitioners. Care flows in multiple directions simultaneously within psychedelic-assisted therapy, moving fluidly through objects, people, and the spaces between and around them. There is a deep entanglement between bodies and beings in these encounters. By advocating for environments that support the embodied experience of the practitioner and allow these complex flows of care to occur unhindered, we are, by proxy, designing for and supporting the participant.
Vibrant Matter
Acknowledge the affective force and inherent agency of materiality itself.
As spatial practitioners, we must engage the physical world as a dynamic participant that actively shapes the therapeutic encounter. We need to extend our understanding of vibrancy far beyond movable furniture and immediate objects, designing, instead, with the awareness that the very matter of the room actively participates in the vulnerable, relational exchanges of psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Loose Space
A case for deliberate open-endedness.
As spatial designers, we need to embrace material unruliness and actively grant our occupants the agency to continuously tinker with their environment, negotiating their own comfort in real time. We must advocate for a deliberate 'un-designing' of the room. We can build spaces that act as tentative holding environments - providing enough architectural slack so the physical room remains just as dynamic and responsive as the unpredictable human experiences it holds.
