Studio Phantastica

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

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PsiConnect

In late 2022 and early 2023, I joined the clinical trial team for PsiConnect, based at Monash University’s BrainPark facility in Clayton. The trial investigated the meditating brain under the influence of psilocybin, capturing data using multiple imaging modalities, including MRI and EEG. I was invited by my supervisor, Dr Martin Williams, a researcher on the project, to contribute to the spatial design of the multiple rooms that this clinical trial occupied. Alongside this spatial consultancy, I was also invited to observe the trial's test run shortly before the trial itself commenced.

This project marked the first time I was engaged not just as a student researcher, but as a professional spatial consultant in a P-AT context. And it was through the project's consultation phase that I came into direct contact with the profound 'trouble' of these institutional environments. Navigating this highly regulated medical context meant grappling with a relentless series of systemic frictions: vanishingly small budgets, severely limited and urgent timeframes, the sheer volume of emails required to get anything approved, bureaucratic maintenance protocols that demanded formal work-orders just to change a lightbulb, and hard-wired infrastructure that left room configurations stubbornly fixed. I could go on.

Despite the awkwardness and discomfort of this encounter, however, it yielded some of the most valuable methodological lessons of my entire research project. Grappling with the trouble of the institutional context forced a necessary pause, demanding that I sit back and ask myself: where is design actually needed? This question, and the institutional friction that provoked it, directly inspired a tactical approach to space-making. Working tactically within the context of this project allowed me to bypass the stringent regulations of the trial space, and this approach remains a persistent, evolving presence in my practice today.

Weirdness Tactical Alliances Vibrant Matter Loose Space

Attunement

2022

Library

Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life"

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau explores how individuals navigate heavy systems of power. He distinguishes between "strategies" - the rigid, calculated structures of institutions - and "tactics," the nimble, opportunistic manoeuvres of people operating within those imposed spaces. A tactic relies on seizing the moment, quietly manipulating a constrained environment to carve out agency and create unexpected results.

This concept of tactical manoeuvring proved extremely useful to me during my time with the PsiConnect trial. I used de Certeau's framework to establish a highly responsive way of working. Embracing a tactical methodology allowed me to effect spatial changes I otherwise would not have been able to.

Donna Haraway, "Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene"

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway argues for remaining actively present within complex, messy, and disturbed realities. Her approach demands "sympoiesis" - making-with - where cultivating "response-ability" requires us to engage directly with compromised environments. She proposes building collaborative practices for flourishing right inside the ruins, embracing the entanglement of difficult conditions.

This framework provided both the language I needed for the uncomfortable frictions I was experiencing during my time with the PsiConnect team, and a method of working through it. Haraway’s insistence on staying with the trouble became a way forward.