In early 2024, I designed and facilitated a workshop titled PSIKEA: Extending the Sensorium at the Victorian Pride Centre for the NGV's Melbourne Design Week. The workshop was a direct response to a pattern I had observed during multi-site clinical fieldwork across Caritas Christi, Monash BrainPark, and Swinburne University: in the absence of explicit spatial methodologies, psychedelic trial spaces were almost exclusively furnished by researchers shopping at IKEA. And so I wanted to use this mass-produced, highly codified IKEA vernacular as a provocation. Eight women gathered in the Pride Centre’s large multipurpose room to respond to a specific brief: How can you support the body in a way that is both comfortable and unfamiliar?

We began with a sensory introduction and a Vipassana-style body scan, before moving into a sensory attunement exercise. Grounded in the CRISP consent framework, participants paired up as 'Feeler' and 'Facilitator'. Blindfolded and wearing earplugs, the Feelers were plunged into a dark quiet. The Facilitators then guided objects sourced from the Market Hall at IKEA - vegetable scourers, doorknobs, Play-Doh rollers - across their partners' skin, sometimes their hands, arms, even head and neck. I watched as pairs engaged in often unspoken negotiations over touch and permission, which evolved over time as the exercise progressed. I could see a distinct shift from cautious exploration to a more playful, adventurous approach to both touching and being touched. And by the time the exercise concluded, the room was full of excited chit-chat and a sense of openness and connectedness amongst the group. This exercise prepared the room somatically for the central activity: an IKEA-hacking session. Participants were divided into groups around long trestle tables heaving with flat-pack stools, lampshades, zip-ties, elastic bands, cushions, and strapping, and were given an hour to collaboratively dismantle and rebuild these objects in pursuit of unfamiliar comfort.

I had expected the hacking exercise to yield novel architectural shapes or clever ergonomic configurations. Instead, what I was drawn to shifted entirely away from the static objects of comfort that had been created and toward the active enactment of care that I witnessed throughout the room. One group, who tied three DOMSTEN stools together to form a precarious trestle, had a volunteer lie face down across it, her arms draping awkwardly to the floor. I watched as her group members crouched, stretched, and folded themselves into awkward positions to slide cardboard props and sheepskin offcuts under her knuckles. Sometimes they also slipped sheepskin and cushions under their own knees to offset discomfort.

Watching the choreography of care enacted reminded me of my clinical fieldwork with Marg and Justin at Caritas Christi. It reinforced that within psychedelic-assisted therapies, comfort is not a solvable design problem but a continuous, reciprocal group endeavour. As the first workshop I designed and facilitated entirely on my own, PSIKEA marked a critical reorientation in my spatial practice. It solidified the value of 'space-making' as a research method - using the participatory workshop as a spatial laboratory to think with a community rather than simply designing for them. And it fundamentally reoriented my focus back to the criticality of care practices within P-AT encounters.