For a place that’s often described as an urban grid, Naarm holds an intimate relationship with the natural world. Is a sharehouse complete without a monstera? Are birthdays real if they’re not celebrated in Edinburgh or Carlton Gardens? After hitting 30, should I be swapping the club for the Dandenong Ranges? Do I take up climbing?!
Jokes aside, we are fortunate to live in a city where nature feeds through everyday life, and, more importantly, to exist/live/work/create on land whose First Nations peoples have maintained a profound and continuous connection to Country for tens of thousands of years. There is beauty all around us and endless inspiration to draw from it.
If you pause for a hot minute you’ll see it everywhere, especially through a design lens. The ridges of eucalyptus bark, the geometries of shell formations, moss-covered trees, Indigenous grasslands and the hidden networks of fungi beneath the soil. These landscapes produce organic yet abstract patterns – natural systems that quietly shape the way we see and design the world around us.
Pair this connection to nature with a design-forward city full of creatives and the resurgence of late-90s to early-2000s Y2K aesthetics and you get abstracted organica – a descriptor I’m coining because, how else would you put it?
It feels like we’re peeling away from chromey futuristic graphics while still holding onto their structural logic. The super polished metallic surfaces meld into organic forms, fluid, full of imperfections, like a real organism. It’s a collision of styles: futuristic but natural, digital but tactile.