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Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as

Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing
Consciousness

Joshua Falcon

To cite this article: Joshua Falcon (2021) Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological
Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness, Design and Culture, 13:2, 143-163, DOI:
10.1080/17547075.2020.1826182

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 DESIGN AND CULTURE, 2021
Vol. 13, No. 2, 143–163, https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2020.1826182

Designing
Consciousness:
Psychedelics as
Ontological Design
Tools for Decolonizing
Consciousness
Joshua Falcon

Joshua Falcon is a PHD candidate of ABSTRACT Ontological and decolonial designers

Anthropology in the Department of
Global and Sociocultural Studies at
Florida International University. His
research primarily focuses on the
theme of human-nature relations and,
in particular, how alternate states of
consciousness influence one’s
perception of, and relations toward,
nonhuman plants, animals, and the
environment. He is currently
investigating issues surrounding the
legal and ethical implications of drug
have called for a reorientation of the fundamental
relations between humans, things, and the world
away from their entrenchment in modernist and colo-
nial 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 mobi-
lized border thinking, subjugated knowledges, and
143 Design and Culture

use, as well as examining how alternative ways of being as means of challenging

psychedelic substances produce
changes in subjectivity, perception, modernist epistemologies and ontologies, this article
and values. instead examines the role that alternate states of
jfalc020@fiu.edu consciousness may play in the formation of new
ontological designs. In drawing on radical design and
decolonial theory, I argue that psychedelic experien-
ces and states of consciousness can potentially
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not
altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
 J. Falcon

serve as decolonial tools for designing consciousness, and

thereby assist in reorienting human social and environmental
relations toward ontologies of relatedness and
interconnectedness.

KEYWORDS: consciousness, decoloniality, design, language, psy-

chedelics, relational ontology

Introduction
This essay seeks to incorporate the subject of human consciousness
into design practice and theory by taking the alternate states of con-
sciousness and experiences provoked by classic psychedelic sub-
stances as a case in point. While acknowledging that a number of
decolonial and radical design theorists have shown how human
design projects are entrenched in modernist languages and philo-
sophical precepts that work to the detriment of other ways of know-
ing, being, and relating in the world, I instead suggest that our
normalized modes of consciousness have themselves been designed
according to a particular matrix of colonial power. In drawing on con-
temporary scientific research on classic psychedelic substances, I
argue that the alternate states of consciousness and experiences
occasioned by classic psychedelics can potentially help to usher in
new ontological designs by way of expanding individualistic senses
of subjectivity. By understanding human consciousness as a multipli-
city which can confer a wide variety of attributes, senses, and abil-
ities depending on what states of consciousness are experienced,
design theory and praxis can begin to consider how the design of
our consciousness itself constitutes a domain worthy of further
exploration in cultivating ontologies and social relations based on
interconnectedness and interrelatedness.

The Nature of Design

From early on, design theorists such as Herbert Simon (1969, 114)
have suggested that what design broadly refers to is the capacity for
making things other than they are; that is, making things “how they
ought to be.” The attempt to make things how they ought to be, or
to make things other than they are, however, not only involves cer-
tain assumptions about how one understands the object, phenom-
ena, or event that one intends to design; it also involves value
144 Design and Culture

judgments that are made before and throughout the design process.
The practice of design, therefore, already embraces certain philo-
sophical precepts, including, at the very least, ontological assump-
tions as well as a political and ethical stance. As preconceived
notions are inherently at work in any design practice, it becomes
clear that while design involves both “making sense of things” and
“problem-solving” (Manzini 2015, 35), it does so in accordance with
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

a particular philosophical configuration. The philosophical underpin-

nings according to which one makes sense of things, and
approaches so-called problems, is contingent upon a panoply of fac-
tors including one’s culture, language, agential potentials, and even
one’s state of consciousness.
While design theorists have suggested that the origins of design
are anthropocentric, dating back 2.5 million years to our tool-making
ancestors Homo habilis (Friedman and Stolerman in Manzini 2015,
xi), it should be recognized that designing, or the intentional act of
developing certain problem-solving strategies to problematic circum-
stances, is rife throughout the more-than-human world. All living
creatures design their environments in ways that are appropriate to
their modes of being, and “all organisms make ecological living pla-
ces, altering earth, air, and water [ … ] In the process, each organism
changes everyone’s world” (Tsing 2015, 22). In this communal world,
each nature struggles to maintain its characteristic shape as it
engages “with the necessities of exterior limitations” (Kratochv
ıl 2016,
75). By taking on certain styles of being in relation to the world, each
entity prioritizes “particular relations” according to the unique strug-
gles they encounter (Kratochv
ıl 2016, 76). In design terms, insofar as
each organism is incessantly faced with problems that it must find
solutions to, and therefore must make sense of things in order to do
so, each entity contributes to the weaving of an interconnected web
of “intergenerational living spaces,” wherein each entity engages with
their environment through a process of “redesign” (Tsing 2015, 161).
In echoing the notion that design is not an activity exclusive to
anthropos, designer Tony Fry (2014, 21) has suggested that the gen-
esis of design not only precedes human existence but also remains
“lodged in our origin.” On Fry’s (2014, 21) account, design is a pre-
eminent, “prefigurative force”; it is an “ontological driver that powers
the endless (to date) transformative cycling of things, beings,
and Being.”
Notwithstanding the idea that design refers to a natural propensity
that is enacted through all entities in their “worlding[s]” of the world
(Fry 2014, 14), it can be maintained that design takes on a qualita-
tively different dimension for human beings given the complexity of
human language and abstract thought. And while further acknowl-
edging that complex forms of language exist across all lifeforms –
from prokaryotes which engage in signaling processes to the idea
that all living entities are involved in a “semiosis of life” (Skyrms 2010;
Kohn 2013, 55) – there still remains nuances between the influence
145 Design and Culture

that human language has on our ontological designs when com-

pared with those of nonhumans. Holding debates over the human–
nonhuman divide aside, most human languages today have
proceeded in a way that is markedly different from that of other crea-
tures, including even from human oral traditions, given how exten-
sively they have tended to isolate things from their relations and,
thus, develop abstract ideas that are context independent. While the
 J. Falcon

ability to abstract in such a way undoubtedly confers certain advan-

tages to human design projects, it nevertheless runs the risk of
imposing rigid structures over what is otherwise an everchanging,
fluid, and interrelated world. The styles of reification mediated by
human language reflect certain philosophical precepts which in turn
affect one’s conceptualization of the world. As there are particular
philosophical commitments embedded in contemporary languages
and designs, our styles of reification inherently contain certain value
judgments about the phenomena being categorized and, as such,
warrant a brief investigation into how language lends itself to multiva-
lent design practices.

Human Language and Design

Across the spectrum of design practices that exist, it is clear that lan-
guage plays an indispensable role in the human design projects
found across contemporary societies. Granted that communication is
“an essential feature of life” (Mansuco 2017, 43), without which living
beings could not learn from or adapt to the challenges they encoun-
ter throughout their lives, it appears that human world-making proc-
esses are markedly distinct from those of nonhumans in that they
tend to abstract and isolate things from their relations, and phenom-
ena from their multivalent contexts. In considering the formal lan-
guage used in contemporary design projects, there is an implicit
incorporation of modernist philosophical precepts which construe
entities, phenomena, and experiences in particular ways. It is in this
sense that modern human language influences “our perception of
things itself [and] does violence to the very nature of ‘things in being’-
which is the relational character of all things as ‘world’” (Heidegger
2002, 7). The processes at work in modern human language sys-
tems have been referred to by some as “the denaturing of physis,” a
phrase used to denote matter which has been denatured through a
process of reification (Kratochv
ıl 2016, 17). The philosopher Zdene k
Kratochv
ıl (2016, 28) has suggested that what reified natures denote
are natures described from one perspective; an entity reified in this
manner is thus rendered devoid of their temporal and informal asso-
ciations and interrelations. Notwithstanding the fact that reification
through language is a pragmatic function which contributes to
human survival and aids in the acquisition of certain kinds of special-
ized knowledges, there are degrees to which natures can be
abstracted or denatured; thus, there are different styles of reification
that emphasize certain relations over others.
146 Design and Culture

This relationship between the philosophical foundations and onto-

logical designs of our world-making practices and the manner in
which phenomena and entities are reified through language is an
area of inquiry that has garnered significant attention from philoso-
phers and social scientists alike. Misia Landau, for instance, has
argued that “reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in lan-
guage, but instead is actually produced by language itself” (Landau
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

in McKenna 1992, 7). Landau’s assertions echo what Whorf and

Carroll (1956, 212) recognized decades earlier in claiming that lan-
guage is not only central to the formation of mental categories and
activity but that it also plays an integral role in our impressions, ideas,
and analyses of the world. For Whorf and Carroll (1956, 252),
because our thoughts themselves are in language, it follows that our
analyses into the nature of things will tend to emphasize certain phe-
nomena and relations over others, based on our culture, our reason-
ing abilities, and the formation of our consciousness. Taking this line
of thought a step further, Whorf maintained that the most founda-
tional aspects of our thought – including intuitions, common sense,
and our modern notions of time, space, matter, nature, and reality –
are thus bound “by the structuralizations which our languages
impose upon the flux of experience” (Spier, Hallowell, and Newmann
1941, 197). Said another way, Gilles Deleuze’s (1990) philosophical
reflections on language further suggest that, while abstract catego-
ries of meaning are inscribed onto “contextually specific phenomena”
to help make sense of reality, our linguistic categorizations neverthe-
less come at a cost to the entity that is thereby “serialized” (Grove
2018, 235).
Matters become more complex when one realizes that not only
does language denature entities and phenomena in particular ways
depending on one’s culture and philosophical precepts, but that
there are different modes of relating to things in the world, and
thereby different styles of reification, depending on one’s state of
consciousness as well. Following Kratochv
ıl (2016, 30–1), the man-
ner in which natures are grasped also “depends on our state of con-
sciousness [ … ] We construct a thing from phenomena and from the
intentions of consciousness, and we construct it in the world, a spe-
cific world.” The constitution of a thing therefore “already presume[s]
a certain character of world, certain types of relations into which the
thing will fit. The type of world offers a statement about how our con-
sciousness relates itself to being” (Kratochv
ıl 2016, 31). Becuase our
styles of reification, and therefore our design practices, are ultimately
mediated by both our states of consciousness and our forms of lan-
guage, they do not only reflect particular philosophical configurations,
they also highlight the intimate relationship between consciousness,
language, ontology, praxis, and design. If certain states of con-
sciousness tend to produce certain styles of reification, and these
modes of categorization reflect a certain relation with the world and
its entities, then not only must the denaturing grasps mediated by
147 Design and Culture

language take center stage in design thought, but so must the study
of consciousness itself. What this theoretical trajectory leads us to,
however, is questioning just how it is that modern philosophies, lan-
guages, and forms of consciousness have influenced the conditions
we collectively observe and experience in the world today. Given that
modern ways of knowing and being have ultimately shaped our
modes of consciousness, styles of reification, and our naturalized
 J. Falcon

philosophical commitments – and, further, that it is through these

modes of thought and consciousness that reality has been con-
strued, including the relations between beings and things – I suggest
that decolonial thought can help shed light on how modern ways of
knowing and being continue to have adverse effects today.

The Coloniality of Power and Design

By investigating the conceptual indebtedness that most contempor-
ary languages, concepts, and design practices have to modernity,
we inevitably arrive at the view that modernity cannot be approached
solely as an historical event. Although the inception of modernity is
inexorably tied to the European conquests across the Global South,
modernity also constitutes a form of “epistemological imperialism”
which persists to the present day (Tuathail 1996, 76). When viewed
from a decolonial perspective, the continued presence of modernity’s
colonial socioeconomic relations and philosophical commitments can
be subsumed under the concept of coloniality, a term used to
denote the patterns of domination that emerged during early coloni-
alism but which have continued to define knowledge production, cul-
ture, intersubjective relations, and labor relations (Maldonado-Torres
2007, 243; Schulz 2017, 129). Coloniality also implies a collection of
hegemonic knowledge systems, known as “the coloniality of power,”
according to which aesthetic, moral, and epistemic resources have
been distributed to both reproduce and reflect imperial logic (Quijano
1998; Dussel 1998; Mignolo 2000, 2009; Santos 2000; Alcoff 2008,
83; Mignolo and Escobar 2013). The coloniality of power has been
described by decolonial thinkers as a “cognitive empire”; one which
promulgates the idea of a rational subject “that is epistemic rather than
concrete or empirical” at the center of its capitalistic, patriarchal, and
colonial system of power (De Sousa Santos 2018, 87). On this view,
modernity signifies a set of colonial self-serving “macronarratives” which
persist to this day and are hence constitutive of coloniality; decoloniality
is a response to the ongoing suppression of other ways of knowing and
being and aims to end coloniality through the dismantling of modernity’s
principles, philosophical assumptions, and its imposed social relations
(Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 109).
While the concepts of coloniality and the coloniality of power are
understood by some decolonial thinkers as shorthand for the more
expansive notion of the “colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo and
Walsh 2018, 114), the theoretical developments of coloniality and the
coloniality of power remain among the foremost contestations to the
148 Design and Culture

unquestioned philosophical precepts that have accompanied and

justified colonialism and its continued interventions. In terms of
design, Arturo Escobar (2018, 83) has argued that the coloniality of
power constitutes a “modern onto-epistemic order.” According to
Escobar, this has direct implications for design insofar as the hege-
monic knowledge systems of modernity are rooted in patriarchy and
the rationalistic tradition and have led to several destructive
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

conceptual outgrowths which have been naturalized across the

Global North. These include: a) the belief in the individual, devoid of
its relational embeddedness; b) the Cartesian rendering of a real,
objective, and “single world,” or what John Law (2015) has referred
to as the One-World World (OWW); c) the reinforcement of a “single
world” through the hierarchization of scientific knowledge along with
the invisibility and dismissal of “other knowledges and ways of
being”; and d) the integration of a capitalist economic model with its
market dynamics that constitute “the default setting of much of soci-
onatural life in late modernity” (Escobar 2018, 86–90).
What Escobar essentially argues here is that modernity, colonial-
ism, patriarchy, rationalism, and the coloniality of power all coalesce
into a metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological design system
which has annulled the possibility of other worlds through its exten-
sive domination. Within this contemporary one-world world ontology,
or the modern onto-epistemic order, there are processes of transla-
tion wherein people, things, and the world are deciphered according
to the teleological and philosophical commitments of modernity,
including rationalism, the idea of progress, and utilitarianism. These
ways of knowing which constitute the coloniality of power, also
referred to as the epistemologies of the North (De Sousa Santos
2018), are further entrenched in the global capitalist enterprise which
has been described as a system of translation wherein there is “the
drawing of one-world-making project into another” (Tsing 2015, 62).
This drawing of other bodies, natures, and worlds into one filtered
through the coloniality of power has led to particular patterns of reifi-
cation which reinforce the subjugation of particular social groups as
well as the nonhuman sphere.
Following Escobar, the coloniality of power can be understood as
a design project and process which continues to affect design theory
and practice today. As an ontological design, the coloniality of power
entails a particular formula for sensing the world, and solving relevant
problems, while ordering things in the way that they “ought” to be. At
its core, the coloniality of power proceeds through both an occular-
centric “scopic regime that equates seeing with knowledge” (Rose
2016, 3) and a logocentric framework which works to transcenden-
tally justify these “naturally” derived observations (Tuathail 1996). For
decolonial designers such as Madina Tlostanova (2017, 52), modern-
ity/coloniality constitutes nothing less than a “total design” process
that has imposed itself on “the fundamental relations between peo-
ple, the world and things.” To further complicate matters, this per-
149 Design and Culture

spective cultivates the foundations “for a worldview to be built on a

rigid essentialist modern/colonial model that hides its locality and
represents itself as universal or natural” (Tlostanova 2017, 52). The
logic of coloniality, in this view, has resulted in a “coloniality of
design” that controls and disciplines “our perception and interpret-
ation of the world, of other human and nonhuman beings and things
according to certain legitimized principles” (Tlostanova 2017, 53).
 J. Falcon

The coloniality of design reflects a “set of specific ontological, epi-

stemic, and axiological notions imposed forcefully onto the whole
world,” subjugating other forms of knowledge and ways of being in
the process (Tlostanova 2017, 53). The modernist ontology emanat-
ing from the coloniality of power therefore tells a story of the world
from a “disembodied vantage point that eliminates other possible
ways to produce, transmit and represent knowledge” (Tlostanova
2017, 52).
At the root of the matter, however, is the fact that this modern
onto-epistemic design which permeates everyday life and infrastruc-
tures has been constructed, in part, through language. Although our
perceptions of the world, and our relations in it, can significantly be
influenced by our states of consciousness as well, it is through
“discursive enframings” (Slater 2004, 109), “reified grasps”
(Kratochv
ıl 2016), and the “serializations” (Grove 2018) and
“structuralizations” (Whorf and Carroll 1956) of modern language that
that the one-world ontology has established its predominance. To
reorient human social relations with human and nonhuman others
alike, design itself must be liberated from the coloniality of power.
This, in turn, “requires problematizing the affective and conceptual
operations that form the basis of our relations with the world”
(Tlostanova 2017, 52) and entails “imagining new articulations
between living systems and infrastructural assemblages, metabolic-
ally and ontologically steered” so that the “redesign of life” can be ori-
ented toward the flourishing of all planetary beings (Escobar
2019, 139).

Political Ontology and Decolonizing Design

Across the multiple dimensions through which decolonial thought
has reproached the coloniality of power, design has recently become
a rallying point for some theorists insofar as it is perceived as having
the potential to usher in in new ways of being, doing, and relating in
the world. While many decolonial and radical design thinkers recog-
nize that “design [ … ] is equally not neutral: it either future or defu-
tures, sustains or destroys” (Fry 2018, 174), it is understood that
design, once freed from the philosophical constraints of the colonial-
ity of power, can be remade into a “powerful ontological tool capable
of transforming” sociocultural realities (Tlostanova 2017, 51).
Following this line of thought, ontological designing has the capacity
to either future or defuture, work toward flourishing or destructive-
ness, by the manner in which it is articulated. Insofar as ontological
150 Design and Culture

design provides conceptual models that help to arrange the

“relations between the world, things and human beings” in particular
ways, it follows that ontological design can also be manipulated in
manifold ways (Fry 2017).
In drawing extensively on Fry’s notion of ontological design,
Escobar (2018, 2019) has further developed the political implications
of this concept by putting it into conversation with the
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

Epistemologies of the South (ES) framework developed by

Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2000, 2018). The result has led
Escobar to political ontology – a concept coined by anthropologist
Mario Blaser (2009) and further developed by Marisol De La Cadena
(2010) – which represents a perspective that views globalization as
the “ontological occupation” of subaltern worlds “at the expense of
relational and nondualist worlds worldwide” (Escobar 2018, 69).
Escobar views the potential of design optimistically, claiming that we
should strive to “reorient design practice from its traditional mean-
ings,” which are directed at the creation of objects, individuals,
technological advances, and the market, to a more situated, collab-
orative, and user-centered design that focuses “on the production of
human experience and life itself” (Escobar 2018, 48). As the world
we currently inhabit bears the mark of coloniality with its subordin-
ation, suppression, devaluation, and ultimate “destruction of forms of
knowledge and being that do not conform to the dominant form of
modernity,” Escobar (2018, 95) reasons that an “ontological-political
field” is emerging that can reorient social and cultural practices “in
ways that clearly foster the intersecting goals of ecological sustain-
ability, social justice, and pluriversality.”
Decolonial thinkers often draw inspiration from the “positive
ontologies” and “decolonial designing strategies” which emanate
from the Global South (Tlostanova 2017, 55), with the Zapatista
social movement of Mexico being a prime exemplar (Zibechi 2012;
Fitzwater 2019). For many decolonial theorists, the Global South
stands as a living testament to the fact that other ways of being,
knowing, relating, and, ultimately, designing are possible (Botero, Del
Gaudio, and Gutie
rrez Borrero 2018). The struggle against modern-
ity’s one-world world ontology that the Global South presents has
therefore served as a wellspring for the decolonial and pluriversal
imperative to make “a world in which many worlds fit” (Escobar
2018, xvi). Although some have remained less hopeful than Escobar
about the transformative potential of ontological design given the
“predominance of negative ontological designing” in the contempor-
ary world, there is nevertheless an acknowledgment that decolonial
design projects can potentially cultivate a sense of increased
“maturity and responsibility” that is necessary for creating a more
positive future (Tlostanova 2017, 60). Ontological design, political
ontology, and the call for decolonizing design therefore stand as con-
temporary approaches to our current predicament that signal the
need for a change in our ontological commitments. As such, they
151 Design and Culture

promulgate a delinking from modern design principles and instead

draw inspiration from those ontological designs, largely from subal-
tern groups, which are based on principles of reciprocity and
relationality.
To reorient design, it has been suggested, will require a “profound
ontological transformation” insofar as there is “significant ontological
work” that needs to be done to begin ridding ourselves of the
 J. Falcon

defuturing and denaturing effects of the coloniality of power and

design (Escobar 2018, 92). Following Escobar, this calls for a
“political activation of relationality” which maintains a dualist ontology
in reference to practices affecting nature, yet transcends this dualism
through practices of relationality (Escobar 2018, 103). Given that
Escobar understands the ecological crisis of our time as being linked
to the coloniality of power and to the “crises of modern systems of
thought” (Escobar 2008, 8), what he ultimately promulgates is a
“new ecological episteme” that is rooted in intracultural dialogue, pur-
posive living, and multispecies flourishing (Escobar 2018, 124). While
developing new ontological designs which prioritize relationality,
autonomy, and reciprocity are necessary to combat the coloniality of
power and the “ecological crisis of reason” (Escobar 2018, 95), the
emergence of these relational ontologies cannot be imposed by an
authoritarian regime. Instead, new ontological designs must emerge
organically through the cultivation of “shifts in consciousness through
various means” (Escobar 2018, 217).

Designing Consciousness and Psychedelics

To rehash the argument I have put forth thus far, human design
practices are first and foremost mediated through the ways in which
our languages reify, and our states of consciousness relate to, enti-
ties and phenomena. The forms of language that are regularly
employed in advanced capitalist societies today can be understood
as being entrenched in modern philosophical precepts which influ-
ence our language, perception, and even our ethical values, given
that they reify entities and phenomena according to a particular onto-
logical design. Decolonial thinkers have described the coloniality of
power as a hegemonic knowledge and design configuration that has
delimited labor relations, aesthetic values, ontological possibilities,
epistemological alternatives, and ultimately other world-making
design projects given its commitment to dominant forms of scientific
rationalism, patriarchy, and Enlightenment ideals such as progress,
humanism, and capitalist market logic. As a response to this state of
affairs, radical and decolonial design theorists argue that design the-
ory and practice can themselves be redesigned to allow new modes
of being and relating to emerge that are based on principles of rela-
tionality and reciprocity. In taking quite literally Escobar’s suggestion
that these pluriversal ontologies must emerge organically through
shifts in consciousness, I argue in this section that experimenting
152 Design and Culture

with alternative states of consciousness can potentially help cultivate

ontological designs which are better attuned to immanence, relation-
ality, and embodiment, as well as an enhanced awareness of our
embeddedness and responsibility to the wellbeing of human and
nonhuman others (Braidotti 2019). Moreover, the implications for
design are that alternative states of consciousness can potentially
offer other modes of reification and relating which are not rooted in
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

the coloniality of power and may therefore help to stultify the dena-
turing effects of its reifying grasps.
One domain in which our modernist-influenced reifying grasps can
be observed, according to Escobar (2018, 84), is in our conception
of the self. While the self in Euro-American epistemologies is charac-
teristically associated with “the individual” which is purportedly
defined by certain properties that can be objectively distinguished,
Escobar instead draws on Ingold to assert that the self can be better
understood as a nexus “within a continuously unfolding field of
relations” (Ingold 2011, xii). The idea of this relationally embedded
self, however, stands at odds with the coloniality of power, which
embraces a rationalistic, Cartesian, and objectivist worldview that is
mechanistic, reductionistic, positivistic, logocentric, and computa-
tional (Escobar 2018, 80). The effects of this modern onto-epistemic
order have also influenced design theory and practice insofar as they
have led to the standardization of a one-world world that exists sep-
arate from us – the reinforcement of the idea of “the individual” that
is isolated from its preexisting interrelational embeddedness – and
ultimately disempowers and prevents “us from partnering with
nature” and one another (Escobar 2018, 85). Practices which can
transform and expand one’s view of the self, and therefore lead to
relational modes of being, “might foster design thinking and prototyp-
ing that embody the new that is emerging or wants to emerge”
(Escobar 2018, 125). By seeing our modes of consciousness them-
selves as constituting an area worthy of exploration for design and
decolonial thought, Escobar opens the door to the idea of changing
subjectivity and praxis through the production of new modes of
consciousness.
On these grounds, if there are indeed certain practices that can
shift our states of consciousness away from modes which reflect
individualistic and egocentric habits toward more relational and com-
passionate actions – Escobar (2018, 84) mentions Buddhist mindful-
ness meditation practices in particular – then this points us to the
idea that our modes of consciousness themselves are also tied to
the colonial matrix of power. Although the languages which are char-
acteristic of the Global North are constrained by the coloniality of
power through our modern philosophical inheritances, I argue that
our normalized modes of consciousness, and thereby our percep-
tions, languages, and social relations, have themselves been
designed according to the colonial matrix of power. Upon further
examination of this line of inquiry, one finds that the modes of con-
153 Design and Culture

sciousness that have been promoted and naturalized in European

and Western societies throughout the Middle Ages and into the early
colonial expeditions continue to hold pride of place throughout the
Global North; think of the standardized psychological reference to
“normal waking consciousness” as our optimal functioning state
(Edwards 2016, 70), or the seamless cultural integration of certain
drugs, such as sugar, alcohol, and caffeine, and even psychotropic
 J. Falcon

pharmaceuticals (Mintz 1986; De Sutter 2018). The cultural promo-

tion of these normalized states of consciousness has gone hand-in-
hand with the demonization of those substances and practices that
have not been historically permitted across the Global North, such as
mystical experiences, traditional healing, and spiritual practices that
provoke altered states of consciousness through the use of visionary
plants, fungi, and substances (McKenna 1992).
Taking the psychoactive substances referred to in contemporary
pharmacological literature as the “classic psychedelics” as a case in
point, we find that they are categorized under the strictest drug
scheduling in the United States as well as in many countries around
the globe. The classic psychedelics – which include dimethyltrypt-
amine (DMT), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, and psilo-
cybin (Carhart-Harris 2019) – are drugs which endogenously occur in
plants and fungi and have each been historically linked to traditional
practices often associated with healing and spirituality (Schultes and
Hofmann 1998; Guerra-Doce 2015; Samorini 2019). According to
the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, classic
psychedelic drugs are classified as Schedule 1 substances which
have no known medicinal value and a high potential for abuse. Not
only have all classic psychedelic drugs been illegalized through
executive orders in the United States since 1970, if not earlier in
some cases, psychedelics have also carried with them pejorative
connotations which render those who consume them as drug
addicts, morally degenerate, and even potential threats to national
security (Szasz 1974; Lovering 2015). Although psychedelic substan-
ces initially gained recognition for their therapeutic and quasi-religious
value soon after they became objects of knowledge in Euro-
American societies throughout the early to mid-twentieth century
(Pollan 2018), they have since been outlawed, making those who
consume or cultivate these substances run the risk of persecution.
Within roughly the past two decades, however, the negative
depiction of psychedelic substances has started to erode as new
scientific studies have begun to legitimize the therapeutic potential of
classic psychedelic drugs (Carhart-Harris and Goodwin 2017;
Johnson et al. 2019; Kuypers 2019). Although studies are now
showing that classic psychedelics exhibit remarkable efficacy in treat-
ing mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and sub-
stance addiction, it has now been established that psychedelics can
reliably provoke “mystical experiences” which study participants rank
among the most meaningful of their lives (McCorvy, Olsen, and Roth
154 Design and Culture

2016; Johnson, Garcia-Romeu, and Griffiths 2017; Noorani et al.

2018; Carhart-Harris et al. 2016, 2017). Recent trials on psilocybin –
a classic psychedelic compound which occurs in certain species of
fungi – have further found that the mystical-type experiences induced
by the substance can contribute lasting positive effects which may
include an enhanced capacity for empathy, more altruistic actions,
and even changes in the personality trait of openness, which has
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

been linked to increased creativity and changes in visual perception

(Griffiths et al. 2006, 2008, 2011; MacLean, Johnson and Griffiths
2011; Antinori, Carter, and Smillie 2017; Pokorny et al. 2017).
Further evidence suggests that the use of classic psychedelics pre-
dicts increased nature relatedness and pro-environmental behaviors
(Forstmann and Sagioglou 2017; Lyons and Carhart-Harris 2018). It
is reasoned that, since one of the physiological effects of classic psy-
chedelics is that they tend to suppress the Default Mode Network
(DMN) – a top-down neural network that researchers have correlated
with the ego and one’s sense of self – they thereby often lead to
experiences wherein there is an expansion or dissolution of oneself
and a merging with others or the environment (Carhart-Harris et al.
2014, 12). As such, researchers have noted that psychedelics there-
fore produce increased connectedness that can be observed neuro-
logically and experienced phenomenologically, leading individuals to
feel more interconnected with themselves, with others, and the world
at large (Watts et al. 2017; Carhart-Harris et al. 2018).
If psychedelics can indeed “reboot” or “inactivate” our “behavioral
subroutines” (Nichols in Miller 2017, 25) and bring about
“desemanticized states” (Baker 1994, 65–72), then psychedelic
states of consciousness can potentially be used as tools to loosen
the modernist philosophical legacies we have inherited from the colo-
niality of power while helping to generate new philosophical and eth-
ical commitments based on interconnectedness (Falcon 2017).
Bringing attention to human psychology and consciousness when
contemplating issues of social and environmental justice is nothing
new; however, as the interdisciplinary field of ecopsychology has
long recognized, human psychology itself needs to be looked at
more closely when problematizing anthropogenic environmental
destruction (Roszak 1992). Taking this line of thought a step further,
the late psychologist Ralph Metzner (1999, 4) has developed his own
version of ecopsychology known as “green psychology,” which pos-
its that the ecological crises of our time require a “fundamental
reorientation of human attitudes” toward the entirety of the nonhu-
man realm. One method which can assist in this fundamental
reorientation of human social relations with the nonhuman, according
to Metzner (1999, 4), is the “use of hallucinogenic visionary plants,”
which can ultimately help to “cultivate a more direct psychic, con-
scious connection with the natural world.” For Metzner (1994, 1),
psychedelic plants and fungi can also potentially help “individuals,
tribes, and nations” to “free themselves from the residues of the
155 Design and Culture

ideological oppression practiced by what they see as Eurocentric

culture.” Metzner’s assertions here are reminiscent of what anthro-
pologist Charles Laughlin (2013, 287) has suggested: not only may
alternative states of consciousness play a formative role in the devel-
opment of a culture’s relations with nature but these experiences
can also, when cycled through a particular people’s fabric of mean-
ing, reinforce either a holistic and interdependent sense of self that
 J. Falcon

extends to the commons or a “fragmented and analytic sense of

self,” which may lead to a desacralization of place.
All things considered, though, psychedelic experiences do pro-
duce drastically diverse effects on different people as they are influ-
enced by a range of dynamically interacting factors, including one’s
life history, mood, intentions, expectations, physiology, the substan-
ce(s), and the environments in which they are consumed, to name a
few (Hartogsohn 2017). Furthermore, the medicalization of psyche-
delics presents issues of its own, such as decontextualizing tradition-
ally used plants and fungi to the detriment of indigenous peoples
who brought knowledge of their properties to the Global North, in
addition to drawing psychedelics into capitalistic assemblages
(Noorani 2019). Moreover, contemporary research on psychedelics
largely adheres to the epistemologies that are characteristic of the
coloniality of power, including rationalism and a belief in the individ-
ual; both of which map neatly onto allopathic models of medicine.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, it must still be recognized that
“once integrated in the ecologies of knowledges, modern science
can be a useful tool in the struggles against oppression” (De Sousa
Santos 2018, 45). The contemporary resurgence of research on the
classic psychedelics can therefore be understood as helping to valid-
ate the “multistate paradigm” put forth by psychologist Thomas
Roberts (2015, 2019), which maintains that multiple “mindbody”
states are potentially available to humans, each of which can alter
our physiology and perception in ways that may enhance or atrophy
particular senses and abilities. In reflecting on the mindbody states
regularly provoked by the classic psychedelics, Roberts (2013, 37)
maintains that they allow people to “see their responsibilities, actions,
and inactions in a wider context” and help to shift values “from those
that are self-centered to those that center more on a group, society,
humanity, and even the cosmos.” Multistate theory has significant
implications for design theory and praxis insofar as our modes of
consciousness can no longer be ignored as a domain that intimately
influences our language, perception, and philosophical commit-
ments. By mobilizing the contemporary scientific research on classic
psychedelics – which itself validates certain aspects of decades of
marginalized and suppressed knowledge – we can begin to consider
the idea of designing our own consciousness by way of experiment-
ing with alternate modes as potential tools to assist in delinking our
thoughts, languages, relations, ways of being, and ultimately our
design practices from the ongoing legacy of coloniality.
156 Design and Culture

Conclusions
If we accept Escobar's (2018, 212) proposition - borrowed from
biologist Kristi Sharma (2015) - that our ontologies and epistemolo-
gies are what sustain our philosophical commitments to reductionis-
tic materialism, unchecked rationalism, patriarchy, essentialism, and
the Cartesian substance metaphysics that splits mind from matter
 Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

and humans from nature, then our efforts as critical design theorists
must be aimed toward “redesigning design from within and from
without” (Escobar 2018, 205). Because the reifications we have
inherited from the coloniality of power proceed by way of denaturing
entities and phenomena through conceptually isolating them from
their relational embeddedness, then we must open ourselves up to
the possibility that experiencing other states of consciousness may
help us to tap into and develop certain “latent potentials, which lie
outside the cultural norm, by entering an altered state of conscious-
ness, by temporarily restructuring consciousness” (Tart 1983, 4).
Given that ontological design, political ontology, and decolonizing
design projects all call for a revolution in our hearts and minds as a
way of redesigning our modern onto-epistemic order, then we must
understand that

To construct a new worldview not bound by the coloniality of

power, then, we must develop a new language and therefore a
new ontological reality. But the recognition that language is a tool
for ‘constructing cosmovision’ is only part of the process.
(Rappaport 2005, 178)

Beyond language, then, we must recognize that there can be “no

social justice without cognitive justice” (De Sousa Santos 2018), and
that even our states of consciousness have been delimited by the
legacy of coloniality. Constructing a new cosmovision based on the
“expression of the radical relationality of life” (Escobar 2018, 225) is
therefore contingent upon recognizing that “many of us [I include
myself] continue to think and act in ways that are dyed in the colors
of colonial power” (Gregory 2004, xv). If psychedelic substances can
reliably confer experiences wherein the metaphysical commitment to,
and phenomenological experience of, separateness can transform
into newfound ontologies grounded in interrelatedness, then this can
help to bring about new ethical values that are more altruistic and
take our interconnectedness with human and nonhuman others into
account. What psychedelic experiences as ontological design tools
for decolonizing consciousness bring to the fore, then, is one of the
many possibilities for ushering in new ontological designs that are
rooted in our inextricable relationality with ourselves, with others, and
the world.
157 Design and Culture

Acknowledgements
With thanks to Kevin Grove who introduced me to design theory
and helped me to develop many of the ideas presented here. I am
also greatly indebted to two anonymous reviewers whose extensive
feedback helped to clarify the overall argument of this paper in add-
ition to enhancing its implications for design.
 J. Falcon

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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