The Tomorrow Party is a co-creative workshop format developed by my colleagues at WonderLab. It combines story-making and "time travelling" - an imaginative role-playing activity - to explore how futures might feel. Thinking about the future can often be incredibly abstract; this format shifts people's perception of the work ahead, seeding a tangible belief that transformative change is possible. I brought this method to a group of researchers and practitioners I knew through the psychedelic community: Dr. Alex K. Gearin (a medical anthropologist), Dr. Tehseen Noorani (an interdisciplinary social scientist), and Kirt Mallie (an Indigenous psychedelic therapist). Together, we co-hosted a session at the Garden States Regeneration Conference outside Melbourne in late 2025.

We knew from our respective fieldwork that psychedelic-assisted therapists rarely have opportunities to connect with one another. The sudden legalisation of these therapies in 2023 had created new above-ground medical pathways for community and connection in legal psychedelic practice. But this small cohort of medical practitioners existed alongside a deeply entrenched underground community and an established network of healthcare providers working specifically in research and clinical trial settings. We wanted to create a shared space where those actively engaged in care provision across all of these diverse, often siloed traditions could connect and collectively imagine the futures of their practice.

The process of co-designing this experience over several months was a real learning opportunity for me. Because my co-facilitators had never experienced the format, I had to initiate them into its mechanics while we figured out how to braid our very different ideas together. One of the central challenges we circled around was safety. How could we embody a respectful approach to the vast spectrum of worldviews present? How could we acknowledge the potential practice and legal vulnerabilities participants might be concerned about?

This challenge ties directly into a core offering of my spatial practice: the idea that safe spaces are not inherently comfortable; indeed, as bell hooks (1994) writes, environments meant for profound transformation fundamentally require the capacity to acknowledge and make room for risk, friction, and vulnerability. Any public space intended to hold multiple, overlapping realities cannot possibly be entirely safe for everyone.

And so, we chose to focus on the small things that we could control. We started with a strict 'no photography' rule and explicitly invited people to remain anonymous. Then, Kirt led the group in a process drawn from his own facilitation toolkit: establishing the 'lore' of the space. Together, we mapped out our group agreements on a whiteboard across three pillars: Respect, Responsibility, and Resonance. Alongside establishing our 'lore', we explicitly named the 'law', acknowledging the precarious legal realities many in the room were navigating. Naming these unsafenesses out loud didn't create a perfectly risk-free container, but it signalled that we were acutely aware of the risks participants were carrying, and that we cared enough to implement measures to help make them safer.

While a more detailed description of the Tomorrow Party’s mechanics and outcomes can be found in my exegesis, my primary takeaways from this project centre on the evolution of my facilitation practice. So much of this doctoral research has been a solo endeavour; despite the privilege of being embedded in WonderLab's wonderfully rich and quirky community of researchers, I have still done much of it alone. Actively collaborating in this space was immensely refreshing. Braiding together our different knowledge systems was a profound exercise in negotiated space, and it was particularly striking to experience the overlaps between Kirt's IPAT (Indigenous Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies) facilitation methods and the WonderLab co-design practices born from Professor Lisa Grocott’s Māori heritage. By doing the work to recognise the multiplicity of unsafenesses in the room - and actively trying to ameliorate them - we demonstrated a tangible ethic and labour of care that had a direct impact on the participants' ease and openness.

Finally, this encounter revealed the profound spatial power of the simple circle. Introduced to our collaboration by Kirt, the circular configuration served as a vital territorialising device. Sitting together on the dirt floor, the simple orientation of bodies toward one another dismantled traditional hierarchies and brought me into relation with every other person in a deeply powerful way. Formed entirely by our bodies, the circle became a symbolic spatio-relational construct. It generated an invisible, deeply tangible membrane around the group, territorialising the space and providing the structural scaffolding necessary to hold the work.