ABOUT PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN
Design shaped the world we're in. It has a responsibility to help reshape it.
Not through better aesthetics or smarter processes — but from within. From a fundamental shift in how designers think, perceive, and relate to the world they're making things for.
In a 1966 study, 27 creative professionals took a psychedelic and were asked to work on their hardest unsolved problem. They produced 44 documented breakthroughs — a new mathematical theorem, innovative architectural designs, an early concept for the microchip. Enhanced creative ability persisted in some participants for weeks afterwards.
Then prohibition ended all research, because the politics made it impossible. That research is back. And what it's uncovering about creativity, perception, imagination, and our relationship with the natural world has direct implications for everyone who makes things professionally.
That's why we started Psychedelics Design.
Inspired by a growing global conversation at the edges of science, culture, and creative practice, PD is a community and education platform for designers, researchers, studios, and creative thinkers who are already paying attention — and want to be part of shaping what it means for their work.
Psychedelics are reshaping how we understand the mind, perception, and our relationship with the living world. The question isn't whether that will connect with design — it's whether that connection will be thoughtful, rigorous, and genuinely useful.
Together, we sit at an unusual intersection. The tools we use and the choices we make influence behaviour, reshape ecosystems, and directly impact our planetary health. Design has impact. It's up to us whether that impact is harmful or healing.
We think it can be. Like all powerful tools, the direction can go both ways. We choose to be hopeful — and rigorous.
We're glad you're here. Let's get this rolling.
Psychedelics Design is free to join.
"Design" to us means graphic, digital, product, brand, communication, service, spatial, and system design — and the research and strategy that surrounds it.
Members get access to exclusive education resources, full event replays, community calls, and more.
We welcome individuals, studios, agencies, institutions, and researchers from anywhere in the world.
Our annual awards programme recognises creative excellence at this intersection. Our annual conference brings the community together online — globally accessible by design.
The Studio houses our evolving design philosophy — a living framework for how psychedelic thinking can inform creative practice. Open to critique, collaboration, and revision.
TEAM
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Alexandra Plesner – Founder And Creative Direction
Designer, Creative Advisor, Artist, Writer, and Founder of Psychedelics Design
Alexandra is a designer and founder working at the intersection of psychedelics and design, and is emerging as a leading voice shaping how this field is understood and developed.
She has worked with studios and agencies including Method Inc., Normally Ltd., Tank Magazine, and Dazed & Confused, contributing to projects across industries. Her work has been featured in Design Week, Wallpaper, It’s Nice That, and Psychedelics Today, with work developed in collaboration with studios also featured in Fast Company and Wired.
Within the psychedelic space, she has developed brand positioning and identity for the Carhart-Harris Lab (formerly at Imperial College London, now UCSF), created the visual system for Hystelica, and led brand work for the Zendo Project.Through Psychedelics Design, she explores how design shapes the environments, systems, and cultural narratives emerging around psychedelics. She is currently completing her first book on psychedelics and the creative process.
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Zoe Wilder – Advisor, Curation and Media
Founder Zoe Wilder Public Relations & Liquid Culture Records
Named “Cannabis Empressaria” by Forbes, “35 Most Influential Women in Cannabis” by Entrepreneur Magazine and recipient of the 2024 Green Market Report Award for Public Relations, Zoe Wilder is a public relations professional specializing in lifestyle, culture and wellness.
For over 20 years, Zoe has worked with hundreds of clients across a variety of industries to develop and execute inventive promotional content and campaigns that capture the attention of tastemakers and influencers from around the globe. Zoe holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the College of William & Mary and a Master of Social Work from Fordham University.
Her team comprises over 50 years of forward thinking and purpose driven public relations expertise working with A-list celebrities, New York Times bestsellers, award winning film, television, radio, music, and consumer products, critically acclaimed podcasts, top brands and business leaders, and publishing oversight for several of the world’s leading peer-reviewed medical journals.
A founding member of DoubleBlind Magazine, a media company covering the expansion of psychedelics around the globe, she also launched Liquid Culture, a revolutionary record label and artist collective redefining the intersection of music, visual art, and cultural innovation. Beyond that, she’s an ambassador for the Last Prisoner Project and Success Centers, advocating for justice and community empowerment; a strategic advisor at Psychedelics Design; and a member of the Association For Electronic Music.
LinkedIn • Instagram • Zoe Wilder Public Relations • Liquid Culture Records
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Floris Wolswijk – Advisor and Events
Founder of Blossom and FLO Coaching
Floris, founder of Blossom, holds an MSc in Psychology from Erasmus University. His passion for psychedelics, sparked by personal experiences and scientific exploration, drives his mission to expand their accessibility for medical and self-development purposes.
He also offers psychedelic-assisted coaching sessions with his Fiance in the Netherlands through FLO Coaching. He hopes to play a vital part in making psychedelics more widely available and used.
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Dennis Walker – MC
Founder Mycopreneur & Co-founder Mycoday
Dennis Walker is a satirist multimedia producer primarily known for his satirizing of the psychedelic space.He is the founder of Mycopreneur, with which he has platformed over 150 mushroom entrepreneurs from 25 countries on six continents. The Mycopreneur platform is a globally recognized leader in the psychedelic media space, with recent press coverage in Rolling Stone, Forbes, High Times, and many other outlets.
Walker is also the Co-Founder of Mycoday functional mushroom chocolate.
LinkedIn • YouTube • Mycopreneur • Mycoday
ADVISORS
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Pernille Brostrup
Founder of Mabel
Pernille Brostrup is a founder and creative strategist working at the intersection of psychedelics, wellness, and women’s mental health. Her cross-disciplinary approach focuses on building more conscious and culturally relevant systems of care.She founded Mabel to reimagine mental health for women — combining storytelling, research, and adjacent policy work to make alternative models not just visible, but viable. With Mabel, she’s helping bring the promise of psychedelic therapy out of the clinic and into everyday life — offering pocket-sized access to psilocybin-supported care through structured microdosing protocols, digital therapy, and a guided ecosystem of support.
As a solo founder, she raised funding to launch in a still-taboo space and continues to advocate for broader access to integrative care. Her work is driven by a belief that psychedelics, when used responsibly, can be powerful tools for restoring balance, expanding self-awareness, and helping women reclaim agency in systems not designed for them.
Originally from Denmark, she lives between Lisbon, Copenhagen, and Paris, and is mum to a teenage son.
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Jalen Salazar
Strategic Advisor, Altered-States Innovator, former McKinsey Partner
Jalen is a seasoned senior leader and mentor who is passionate about creativity and its ability to catalyze and sustain meaningful change.
After a successful multi-decade tenure building and guiding design at the highly regarded LUNAR in San Francisco - receiving the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewett National Product Design Award in 2015, the same year it was acquired by the preeminent management consulting McKinsey & Co. – he became a Partner, and was responsible for ensuring the successful integration of design and for scaling the capability within McKinsey’s North American practice.
Over the course of his 30 years in industry, he embodied a unique marriage of Executive level Strategy and Storytelling, with deeply seasoned Product Development expertise.
At the start of 2020, a personal tragedy ‘ruptured’ life as Jalen (then Jeff) knew it. While he remained passionate about igniting the spirit of exploration to shape better futures for his clients, he was disenchanted by working for industry. He realized that meaningful impact comes when we first focus inwards and that truly authentic change must start there.
In 2024, he graduated from Psychedelics Today’s year long Vital training, and completed Internal Family Systems (IFS) level one equivalent training with the Moxie School.
In 2024, Jalen also launched Altered, a project focused on weaving together insights, prinicples, and practices of altered-states and inner-expansion to help individuals navigate from disrupted states of ‘rupture’ to one of living in aligned ‘rapture’.
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Raad Seraj
Angel Investor in Therapeutic Psychedelics, Host of the Minority Trip Report Podcast and Founder of the Mission Club
Raad Seraj is a Bangladeshi-Canadian entrepreneur and founder of Mission Club, a global angel investor syndicate targeting innovative startups in the psychedelics and mental health nexus. Beyond mere capital, Mission Club promotes a seamless development trajectory of the budding yet dispersed psychedelic ecosystem by injecting the domain with expertise, strategic network, and conviction. Prioritizing early-stage ventures, Mission Club targets both core psychedelic solutions as well as surrounding infrastructure such insurance, software, clinical network, telehealth, media, and retreats. As part of Mission Club’s mandate, Raad also hosts the Minority Trip Report podcast, which spotlights under-represented leaders in psychedelics and mental health.
By day, he spearheads growth at Affinity, a San Francisco startup developing purpose-built AI tools for private capital with global clients like Bain Capital Ventures, Softbank, Techstars, a16z and Bessemer Ventures.
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Joyce Braverman
Medical Doctor
Dr. Joyce Braverman was born and raised in Mexico. After completing her medical degree at Anáhuac University, she continued her studies in the United States and Israel. She worked as an assistant in pediatric surgical oncology, as a consultant for strategic alliances in secondary prevention of childhood cancer, and as the director of medical research at "Med Intelligence," an Israel-based startup focused on personalized medicine research.Throughout her career, she discovered the power of integrative medicine and the potential of medicinal plants in the healing process of terminally ill patients. She became certified in mind-body medicine and Ayurvedic yoga massage, experiences that inspired her to adopt a more holistic approach to healing. This path led her to continue her studies at CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies) in Psychedelic Therapies and Research, deepening her understanding of the Earth's chemistry.
Her journey continues as she strives to integrate her passion for the use of psychedelics in the medical field as a means to reconfigure and inspire others in their healing process and reduce stress responses. She is currently studying functional medicine, and one of her main interests is psychoneuroimmunology.
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Natalie Lyla Ginsberg
Global Impact Officer at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
Natalie Lyla Ginsberg (MSW) is the Global Impact Officer at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, (MAPS), and the co-founder of the Jewish Psychedelic Summit. Natalie joined MAPS in 2014, founding the Policy & Advocacy department, and serving as its director for 5 years. At MAPS, Natalie initiated and co-developed MAPS’ Health Equity program, including MAPS’ first MDMA Therapy Training for Communities of Color, and co-authored the first study interviewing Palestinians and Israelis who have shared ayahuasca ceremonies.Before joining MAPS, Natalie worked as a Policy Fellow at the Drug Policy Alliance, where she helped legalize medical cannabis in her home state of New York, and worked to end race-based marijuana arrests. Natalie was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. She received her B.A. in history from Yale College, and her master’s of social work (M.S.W.) from Columbia University.
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Janine Dennis
Owner/Chief Innovations Officer for Talent Think Innovations LLC and Author of The Absurdity of Doing You
Janine is the Owner/Chief Innovations Officer for Talent Think Innovations, LLC, a multidisciplinary business strategy and management consulting firm. Her career spans twenty years in Consulting and HR that has taken her through the world of pharmaceuticals, the arts, K-12 education, technology, private equity, healthcare, staffing, and R&D just to name a few sectors she has worked in. Janine is a dynamic speaker, entrepreneur, futurist, and respected voice bringing both a human touch, an eye towards design,and business savvy to the companies she works with.It is through the trials and tribulations of her career travels and her passion for Organizational Design, Futurism, Technology, Psychology and Innovation that she created Talent Think Innovations in January 2013. Her aim is to design practical and sustainable solutions, strategies, and training that are a catalyst for innovation and supportive of human evolution. Through her work she is using her experience to get businesses and individuals to embrace the natural trajectory of human transformation as a means of navigating both life and business in an age of rapid transformation.
She has been quoted by HBR, Thrive Global, Bustle, The Cut, Atlanta BlackStar, Newsday, USA Today and has been featured by Entrepreneur, Success, Fast Company, Black Enterprise, Essence and Ebony Magazines. Janine is currently in the process of transitioning her expertise and work to focus on Organizational Design, Mental Health, Neuroscience, Future of Life/Work, Psychedelics, and Wellness. She is also the author of the book titled “The Absurdity of Doing You: Rebel Elegance for the Evolving Soul”. Janine has proventhat humility, innovation, and practical thinking has value and is fast becoming the new business imperative.
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Tracy DeLuca
Founder of How Might We Design
Her work is driven by a passion to transform patient, provider, and caregiver experiences globally.
To achieve this, Tracy creates large-scale new business offerings and organizational transformation, from strategy and visioning, to design and implementation. Most recently, in the Fall of 2022, Tracy DeLuca, Elysa Fenenbock, and Dr. Gianni Glick co-taught Stanford d.school's first course in Psychedelic Medicine x Design.
For the previous two years, she helped lead the creation and launch of Ripple, a clinically-integrated behavior-change and condition management program in Singapore for people living with Type 2 diabetes.
Previously, as Design Lead for Sutter Health, one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the U.S., serving over 3.5 million patients, Tracy helped develop Sutter’s first Design & Innovation team, and led them through a multi-million dollar, system-wide new Primary Care of the Future offering. Implementation of TeraPractice, a more patient- and provider-centered approach to care, includes a new insurance and delivery model, and has so far scaled from pilot launch in April 2018 to 7 locations, with expansion plans for 40 more care teams. So far, these efforts have resulted in a consistent 28% reduction in total cost of care, and Tera earning “Sutter Health’s 2019 Quality Award,” for top measurement scores across the entire system.
Additionally, Tracy helped lead strategy and design for Sutter’s Mental Health Reimagined initiative, where her work focused on a human-centered deep dive into the Psychiatric Acute Care experience, and strategic development of an engagement platform to support youth 15-22, and their caregivers, as they transition out of formal care back into their everyday lives. This initiative, Scout, is now live, and was recipient of an Honorable Mention in the Wellness category for Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards 2021.
Tracy has also helped Headspace, a mindfulness and meditation app, create new business offerings around workplace mental health, and during the first year and a half of the pandemic, Tracy led the Mental Health portfolio for the Emergency Design Collective, a volunteer organization which sprang up from the COVID-19 crisis, focused on better supporting frontline workers and the general population, in the U.S. and abroad, with their mental health.
Events
Connecting a global community through in-person and virtual gatherings that spark fresh thinking and shape the future of psychedelics and design.
Awards
Celebrating Creative Excellence. Showcasing the visionaries redefining psychedelics and design through imagination, innovation, and cultural impact.
Education
Curated recommendations, resources, and learning libraries that connect psychedelics and design to inspire informed creativity.
Newsletter
Independent Editorial. Essays, interviews, and news with complete editorial freedom—guided by fairness, curiosity, and cultural integrity.
Directory
The psychedelic creative pioneers shaping the future—curated through applications, nominations, and on-the-ground insights worldwide.
Coming soon →
Podcast
Podcast. Audio episodes sharing thoughtful stories and future-facing perspectives—bringing the dialogue on psychedelics and design to life in a fresh way.
Studio
Our design, research and experimentation space at the intersection of psychedelics and design. Collaborating across disciplines, we prototype ideas, test new methods, and explore how altered states can expand creative practice and shape regenerative futures.