FOUNDER
Psychedelic medicine needed design infrastructure. The field had none. I built the methodology, then built the school to carry it.
The situation
Psychedelic medicine is approaching legalization. The research is there. The momentum is there. The infrastructure is not.
Without it, the field defaults to clinical models built for efficiency. Those models were not designed for the vulnerability of the experience.
Every part of the journey has to be designed. Intake, preparation, environment, session, integration. Right now, most of that is left to chance.
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What I built
The School of Psychedelic Design is a standalone institution offering courses and consulting for clinics, research teams, organizations, and practitioners building in this space. It extends the methodology beyond the university setting to reach the people actually building the infrastructure of this field.
The consulting work covers three interconnected areas: patient journey design, healing environment and facility design, and organizational systems design. These aren't separate services. They're the same design problem at different scales: how do you build a system that serves healing at every level of contact?
The courses teach the frameworks directly. The goal is that clinic builders, program designers, and practitioners leave with tools they can use immediately in the spaces they're already working in.
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The constraints
Building a school for a field that doesn't fully exist yet means building the standards at the same time as the curriculum. There's no accrediting body, no shared canon, no agreed picture of what good looks like.
The people coming to this work arrive from very different places: clinical training, research backgrounds, traditional wisdom, business and operations. Most have never thought in terms of design. The methodology has to translate across all of them.
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The trade-offs
Stanford reaches a small, curated group. The school reaches the broader field.
The work has to be rigorous enough to hold up under scrutiny and accessible enough to be used by someone new to design.
There is also timing risk. Building this early means the methodology will need to evolve as the field matures.
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There's a real timing risk in building this early. Some of what I'm building will need to change as the field changes. The frameworks have to evolve as the legal landscape shifts, as clinical research matures, as the range of people entering the field grows. That's a commitment to permanent iteration. Most institutions aren't built for that. This one has to be.
What this is building towards
The goal is a field that has design infrastructure the way medicine has clinical protocols: something rigorous enough to be taught, specific enough to be applied, flexible enough to adapt.
Right now, too much of what happens in psychedelic healing is left to chance. The school changes that, one clinic, one organization, one program at a time.