41. Psychedelics and Design Thinking with Sean Lally

““How do you make a good designer?””

Today we discuss Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind, and the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics in terms of its implications for architectural thinking. Discussion topics include design studio pedagogy, creativity, the art of the podcast and the relationship between practice and the design studio. Sean Lally is the host of the Night White Skies podcast.

Timestamp Outline

2:08 Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
5:23 “How do you make a good designer?”
6:47 Sports psychology and the “mindset” in architecture
9:56 Johns Hopkins Psychedelics Research Unit
10:08 “Now we can actually talk about emotions and these things that seemed very abstract...not just as creative endeavors, but as other opportunities for understanding our emotions, and our bodies, and how we engage with space and how we see space, and how we understand knowledge in general.”
12:17 The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
15:11 Studio intentions: Are we making better designers?
18:24 Sean Lally’s design work
19:37 Michael Pollan’s book “as a disciplinary challenge to architectural design thinking”?
20:48 Podcasts as a quick method of thinking: Sean Lally’s Night White Skies
23:42 Failure of language to communicate psychedelic experiences
26:11 Postmodernist critiques of modernist assumptions
28:56 History of research on psychedelics
30:15 Shifting assumptions
31:00 Books: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures) and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
33:48 Architects: Philippe Rahm: climate, microclimate, body. Liam Young: fiction, speculative futures and film
37:50 Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis and the haute couture seasons in fashion: an architectural equivalent?
40:41 Design and writing synergy: “Writing as the couture version of design.”
41:24 OMA’s conceptual and research arm AMO
42:50 Between academia and the practice: an opposition or opportunity for synergy?
44:48 Thom Mayne’s work