In early 2023, Meg, a US-based psychiatric nurse practitioner, reached out to me. She had just secured a space for a ketamine-assisted therapy clinic in Portland, Oregon, and sought my help to establish it. This was my first opportunity to consult remotely, and it prompted me to rethink the way I practice as a spatial designer. Instead of acting as a traditional "fixer" - arriving, developing spatial solutions, drawing plans, and directing contractors - I was learning to operate as a thresholding facilitator, translating an everyday designer’s highly articulated vision into a workable spatial reality.

The reality of remote collaboration introduced immediate friction into our process. I initially relied on my default design tools, attempting to host co-design workshops in a virtual Miro workspace, assuming that visual mapping was a universally accessible language. Instead, the interface erected barriers, prompting a necessary mutual unlearning. Meg subverted my visual tools entirely, shifting our communication to evocative essays, voice memos, videos of spaces she visited, and links to music. To meet her in her modality, I synthesised our exchanges into a progressive spatial mapping document titled Studio Phantastica: Design Thinking for Psychedelic Therapy Spaces, Volume 1: Asanapy of Functional Psychiatry. The document was intended to support her space-making practices through a series of conceptual lenses: Anticipations, Safety, Comfort, Connections, and 'Spatial Suchness' - a concept drawn from architect Kiyoshi Izumi's writings in Bernard Aaronson and Humphrey Osmond’s 1970 text, Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs.

This consultation came two years into my research and allowed me, for the first time, to really synthesise all the ideas I had been circling around: the intimacies of the skin, the mechanics of comfort and safety, the weight of thresholds, and the way a psychedelic experience travels through anticipation and memory long before a clinical room is ever entered. The Asanapy project asked me to finally pin these spinning ideas down. It forced me to translate them into a series of physical, material, and highly actionable recommendations for someone without a formal design background. It was a lot of work, but it showed me that these abstract ideas I sensed were important could actually find real, physical expression through design practice.

Additionally, this remote collaboration expanded my understanding of what spatial practice can be. What happens if I'm not in control? By stepping back from a traditional design process that centres the designer as the one making all the decisions, I started learning to operate in an explicitly supportive role, assisting Meg's space-making practices rather than doing all the design work myself. This project showed me that spatial practice can be more than just a material practice. It can be purely relational, it can be supportive, it can be advocacy. These were ways of thinking about spatial practice that I had never really encountered before, and there was a certain discomfort to having to pry open my understanding of what a spatial practice might be. But as the research continued over the next year or two, I kept opening up that definition for myself. This was a really important shift in my understanding of what spatial practice could look like.