In July 2023, I joined the research team for the Swinburne Three-dose Psilocybin Assisted Psychotherapy (3PAP) trial for Treatment-Resistant Depression. Over two weeks, I accompanied researchers Ruth and Martin on several furnishing expeditions to IKEA to fit out their new trial spaces in Hawthorn. My goal with this fieldwork experience was to observe the 'everyday design' practices of the researchers, in order to better understand the underlying logic they applied to their spatial decision-making.

I followed Ruth and Martin through the showroom, watching as they "sit tested" the sofas - a sequence of bouncing, wiggly back-and-bottom movements, and reclining to gauge lumbar support and nesting depth. We buried our hands in a high-pile green shag rug that "looked like grass" and examined the tactile ridges of mustard-yellow cushions. Their decision-making was deeply tethered to domestic memory and somatic resonance: dark timber and leaf-shaped tables were chosen because they had "been alive," while armchairs that imposed a rigid, authoritative posture on the sitter were immediately dismissed.

What struck me most was how explicitly this logic was voiced. At one point, Ruth mentioned she was looking for a sofa that looked cosy. When I asked her how she defined "cosy," she found it hard to articulate before replying, "I guess something that I would have in my home. If I have it in my home, then it's cosy." Later, when debating colour palettes, she noted, "A little bit of colour is okay, but too much colour is just too much... If I had my way, it would all be earth tones, browns and greens, but that's how I furnish my house because that's what I like."

I observed a similar decision-making pattern during my fieldwork at Caritas Christi and BrainPark. When tasked with creating spaces that feel warm, safe, and inviting, caregivers naturally use their own lived experience as the primary metric for these experiential ideas. But because everyone’s lived experience is different, this raises a tricky question: whose version of "home" dictates the right kind of comfort? What I observed through these practices of everyday design is that we are not witnessing the creation of some objective, universal standard of clinical welcome; instead, everyday designers lean into personal experience. Interestingly, this doesn't diverge much from the approach established decades ago by early psychedelic pioneers. Figures like Humphry Osmond, Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, Al Hubbard, and Timothy Leary all drew heavily on their own personal experiences and preferences to lay the foundation for what we now understand as best practice in 'set and setting'.

In my writing, I have cautioned against using domestic tropes as a proxy for comfort. There is an implicit assumption that the domestic is universally experienced as safe and comfortable, which is simply not the case. As I explored in my essay on comfort (ref. exegesis), 'home' is deeply ambivalent; it can be safe and unsafe, clean and dirty. Relying on it as a universal spatial shorthand is problematic.

Yet, watching Ruth and Martin at IKEA helped me realise something else. If everyday designers are drawing on their own specific, lived experience of homeliness to make spatial decisions, the result is an endless variation of these spaces across different clinics and trials - and all these different permutations seem to work quite well. Recognising this multiplicity is actually incredibly useful. It shows us that we don't need to look for a single aesthetic or design towards a rigid formula. Comfort, safety, and welcome can exist in multiple, highly subjective iterations. Rather than closing down the possibilities of what a psychedelic therapy space should look like, this reality represents a massive opening up of opportunities for novel spatialities to emerge and remain therapeutically effective.