inspiration

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

– Marcel Proust

A New Book on Design & Psychedelics

Coming Soon from Inner Traditions

From history to contemporary practice, psychedelics have always had a complex relationship with creativity. But perhaps the most urgent design challenge of our time isn't aesthetic or technological — it's our estrangement from nature, and from each other. Psychedelics might offer a different path to how we create: dissolving the boundary between self and the living world, cultivating a felt sense of connectedness that could change what we build, and why.

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A weekly newsletter exploring the intersection of psychedelics, design, and culture. Featuring interviews with creative thinkers, project spotlights, and emerging trends across science, ethics, policy, business, and the arts.


First insights: Three original diagrams proposing scope of care as a third axis for models of creative practice

The Symbiotic Cycle of Creativity: three diagrams mapping scope of care and the psychedelic threshold in design

Three original diagrams proposing scope of care as a third axis for models of creative practice, extending Walter Gropius's Bauhaus curriculum wheel (1922), which organised making by material, and Neri Oxman's Krebs Cycle of Creativity (2016), which reorganised it by substrate. Scope of care runs outward in four bands — ego-centred, human-centred, life-centred, symbiotic — and is drawn both as concentric rings, holding the whole field at once, and as a spiral, describing a movement through it. Between the first two bands sits the psychedelic threshold: the ego boundary, where insight opens inward and awe opens outward. The transition from ego-centred to life-centred practice follows the same widening the psychedelic literature describes as ego dissolution and increased felt connectedness. The correspondence is offered as structural, not causal.

Figures: (1) Ego to Symbiotic Spiral (through psychedelic interruption); (2) The Symbiotic Cycle of Creativity; (3) The Creative–Culture Loop.

The model is drawn from five years of practice-based research at Psychedelics Design: interviews, questionnaires and case studies with designers, artists and founders working in and around psychedelic culture. Presented at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics interdisciplinary poster session, October 2026.

All artwork is original to the author. No elements are reproduced from either precedent.

Version 1.0 comprises draft figures. Final designed versions will be deposited as a subsequent version under the same concept DOI.

Figure (1) Ego to Symbiotic Spiral (through psychedelic interruption)

Figure (2) The Symbiotic Cycle of Creativity

Figure (3) The Creative–Culture Loop

Plesner, A. (2026). The Symbiotic Cycle of Creativity: three diagrams mapping scope of care and the psychedelic threshold in design (Version 1.0 (draft figures)). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22545669