What can psychedelics do for design and what can design do for psychedelics?

My book Psychedelics & Creativity follows the artists, architects, scientists and designers past and contemporary who have engaged in altered states. There’s no image budget, so I’m raising £6,000 to license thirty images and pay the people who made them and/or own the copyrights. I’ll post progress as each licence comes through.

Anyone who contributes $50 or more, and companies from $1,000, will be thanked by name in the book’s acknowledgements.

WHERE IT STARTED

I grew up in a small town in the Austrian Alps, where books were my way out into the wider world. As a teenager I read Goethe’s Faust, and one line has stayed with me ever since: the search for “was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält”, what holds the world together at its core. I was always driven by curiosity and getting to the bottom of things. Also, I hetched the idea to write a book some day.

More than a decade later, my father had a stroke, and I watched my grandmother slowly disappear into Alzheimer’s. I kept asking how a person can learn, and unlearn, who they are. Those questions led me to Robin Carhart-Harris’s research on psilocybin and the brain, again many years later.

As a designer, I had a next question: what happens to the things we make when the mind making them is altered?

FIVE YEARS OF CONVERSATIONS

The book began to take shape already towards the end of the first year of the pandemic. I’m more of an introvert, or call it socially shy, and suddenly I could have long one-to-one conversations with people anywhere in the world from my desk. The first was with the type designer Bruno Maag. Then came neuroscientists, architects, musicians, artists, therapists and writers, each conversation leading to the next. Along the way I started Psychedelics Design as a blog and went back to university for a second master’s, in applied psychology, investigating potentially synergies of nature and tech for psychedelic assisted therapy.

Writing a book always felt almost sacred to me, and for a long time I doubted I was the person to write one. I wrote it from 2023 to 2025, and spent 2025 sending it to publishers, an aweful lot of them. In November 2025, Inner Traditions said yes! That meant more to me than I can easily say: they published The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide by James Fadiman, who is, to me, the godfather of psychedelics and creativity.

I signed the contract some months later, and I’m now in the editing stage (yes, we’re talking classic file names: book_V2_V16_final_final-final_FINALv520). Psychedelics & Creativity comes out in 2027.

WHAT'S IN IT

The book follows is written for creatives, it looks at people who brought something back from altered states and gave it form: a building, a piece of art, music, a scientific idea. It moves through the science of the creative brain, the history, substances, and the ethics of a fast-growing field, and more.

THE IMAGES

Inner Traditions offered me something rare and wonderful: eight full-colour images printed as an inlay in the middle, with black-and-white pictures throughout. I was over the moon.

Then I started on the permissions. In publishing, the author pays for the pictures, and there’s no image budget for this book. Every licence fee, archive charge and high-resolution scan is mine to cover.

I’m clearing thirty+ images: photographs, drawings, archival magazine covers, museum objects and contemporary artworks. They come from living artists and photographers, family estates, and archives from Mexico to Vienna. Some I’ve been chasing for months, and a few I’ll only believe once the licence is signed. Fingers crossed as the research continues!

PAYING THE ARTISTS

Several artists and photographers have offered their work for free or at a reduced fee. I’m deeply grateful, and I still want to pay every one of them. Their work is how they make a living, and this book couldn’t exist without it.

Psychedelic culture has borrowed heavily from Indigenous visual traditions, usually without asking and rarely paying. Where this book uses that work, I want the artists asked first, credited the way they choose, and paid what they think is fair.

Part of what you give will also fund an independent cultural and copyright review of the images by a consultancy. That way every image, especially those from Indigenous traditions, appears in the book with the right permissions, context and care.

WHAT YOUR DONATION COVERS

WHAT YOU'LL SEE FROM ME

I’ll post progress here as licences come through, and share the work as I’m allowed to. Anything left over goes toward the launch, so the artists’ work reaches as many people as possible, though I’d love to hear where you’d like it to go. Leave a note with your donation or send me a message.

This book will carry my name, but it comes out of many conversations and many acts of generosity. If you can give, thank you. If you can share this with one person who loves books with good pictures in them, that helps just as much.

With your help, we can tell a visual story that redefines psychedelics as tools for wellbeing, creativity and making.

Share the campaign. Donate if you can.

Psychedelics Design website: www.psychedelics.design

Thank you so much!!