Coming into this research from an interior architecture background, I anticipated that my PhD would follow a relatively traditional design trajectory: designing structures, making physical spaces, and testing them in the world. But over the five and a half years of this project - interrupted and enriched by the realities of maternity and carer's leave - my practice didn't flow in the ways I had expected. Because as I discovered quite quickly, before I could build spaces, I had to build a vocabulary for design practice. The lion's share of my doctoral work became this immense, unanticipated task of translation and foundational research: digging up hidden histories, naming space-making practices, and creating a language and a set of concepts for spatial design in psychedelic care.

Because so much of the PhD was dedicated to this theoretical foundation, I didn't have the opportunity to take these ideas through a traditional, iterative built-environment process. Tanglework emerged right at the very end of the research to serve as the bridge between that deep theoretical work and my future applied practice. In my exegesis, I use the metaphor of a hyphal node - those critical points in a rhizomatic mycelial network where flows of nutrients condense to eventually produce a fruiting mushroom. Tangling is that node. It is a formalised method of sense-making that physically and digitally pulls together the disparate threads of theory, fieldwork, and material experimentation.

In practice, this involved bringing all of these diverse ideas, readings, and project learnings together, both onto the page in Adobe Illustrator and on the wall as a series of assembled material forms. I think of this practice of tangling much like the physical material boards and concept spreads we use in spatial design practice. In my work, these boards sit right at the front end of the design process, serving as a tool for creative ideation to help develop a project concept in both its material articulation and its formal evolution. While a tanglework is much more complex and multi-layered in the sheer density of what it brings together, positioning it alongside this familiar method shows exactly how tangling acts as the generative starting point for a more traditional design process.

In the exegesis, I talk about this feeling of "slipperiness" - that moment when a connection between material and/or form suddenly feels right. It is easy to dismiss this as mere gut instinct, but as Henri Bergson suggests through his concept of intellectual sympathy, this isn't blind intuition. It is an active moment of resonance, a direct result of practised sensory attunement. Just as I pay attention to that slipperiness when working with materials in my private design practice, through this process of tangling, I was doing much the same thing with the arrangement of spatial and research concepts in the tanglework.

This tangling process deliberately acknowledges the inherent messiness of design. At this early concept-building stage, things do not feel clean, refined, or clear. It is about getting as messy as possible, wading through trial and error, and leaning into the discomfort of not knowing exactly where the connections will lead. To me, this Tanglework feels like the vital first step out of the academic space of theory and back into the material world. It is the methodology I will carry forward into Studio Phantastica - a practical way to take the lessons, the observations, and the spatial vocabulary developed over the last five years, and finally begin articulating them in embodied, relational, built environments.