Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

Summary

This article argues that psychedelic experiences and altered states of consciousness can serve as decolonial tools for designing consciousness, potentially helping to reorient human social and environmental relations toward ontologies of relatedness and interconnectedness. It examines how such states might challenge modernist and colonial thought, building on radical design and decolonial theory to envision new ways of being that transcend design's modern philosophical inheritances.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Ontological and decolonial designers have called for a reorientation of the fundamental relations between humans, things, and the world away from their entrenchment in modernist and colonial thought. Both ontological and decolonial design therefore share the vision of transcending design’s modern philosophical inheritances to allow for the flourishing of new ontologies of interrelatedness. Whereas some radical design theorists have mobilized border thinking, subjugated knowledges, and alternative ways of being as means of challenging modernist epistemologies and ontologies, this article instead examines the role that alternate states of consciousness may play in the formation of new ontological designs. In drawing on radical design and decolonial theory, I argue that psychedelic experiences and states of consciousness can potentially serve as decolonial tools for designing consciousness, and thereby assist in reorienting human social and environmental relations toward ontologies of relatedness and interconnectedness.