Designing the Future: Lessons from the Symbiocene at Melbourne Design Week

• The Symbiocene proposes a transition from the human-dominated Anthropocene to a future where culture, technology, and the economy operate in reciprocal, sustainable relationships with the living world.
• A core objective of this era is to move beyond extractive practices by treating natural systems and entities as integral members of our communities rather than merely resources for human use.
• Achieving this vision involves rediscovering indigenous knowledge and ecological principles, such as those used in permaculture, to help humanity recognize its role as a participant within a larger, interconnected web of life.

 

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By Alexi Freeman

 

Beneath the rainbow-coloured stained-glass ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Great Hall, attendees were invited to spend a morning in the dappled light of the next century.

Rather than speculating about catastrophe, collapse or a last-gasp technological fix, It’s 2100: Welcome to the Symbiocene flipped the script with a more nature-attuned vision for the future.

Speakers were asked to reflect from the perspective of the year 2100, looking back on the choices that moved humanity beyond the Anthropocene into a more reciprocal relationship with the living world.

Throughout the day, speakers from disciplines as diverse as design, economics, ecology, storytelling and law kept returning to a shared conclusion: the defining challenge of the 21st century is moving from extraction to relationship.

As NGV design curator and host Ewan McEoin observed, extraction requires distance. “You cannot mine what you’re in relationship with. You cannot clearfell your kin.”

McEoin’s proposition sat at the heart of the event.

The question wasn’t simply how to build more sustainable cities, economies or technologies, but how to rebuild relationships with Country, communities and the more-than-human world.

For First Nations designer Alison Page, that transformation begins by rethinking our relationship with place.

“The blueprint for the symbiocene lies in the Dreaming.”

Page imagined that the built environment of the 2100s would become “an extension of Country”, while Treaty would evolve beyond a legal framework into a cultural and spiritual invitation to reconnect with land, water, plants and animals.

Page argued that humanity doesn’t need new knowledge so much as a remembering of older forms of knowing.

The economy panel challenged many assumptions about what prosperity actually means.

Political economist Katherine Trebeck invited the audience to imagine future generations reflecting on our era with a simple question:

“Why do we settle for this?”

Speaking from the perspective of 2100, Trebeck described the early 21st century as an age that tolerated extraordinary inequality while treating economic growth as an end in itself.

In the Symbiocene, society returned to the original meaning of economy as household management — except the household was now understood as the entire planet.

Success was no longer measured solely by GDP growth, house prices or share portfolios, but by indicators of wellbeing, safety and connection.

“How many girls can ride their bikes to school?” became a more meaningful measure than quarterly economic growth.

While discussions about the future often revolve around artificial intelligence, automation and digital infrastructure, the technology panel looked to the living world for answers.

For regenerative systems designer Dhiren Das, the highest technology isn’t artificial but biological intelligence.

Das painted a world that gradually realised Nature had already solved many of the problems humanity was attempting to engineer its way out of.

“We realised that we don’t need to manipulate the natural world; we need to be a part of it.”

His presentation traced a shift away from fossil-fuel extraction and resource-intensive systems towards urban forests, circular material economies and energy networks inspired by ecological principles.

Rather than asking how Nature could serve human systems, the Symbiocene asks how human systems might participate in natural ones.

As our time travel to 2100 wound back toward 2026, Albrecht reflected on something noticeably absent from many contemporary environmental conversations:

“I can hear the relief from the Earth and its people.”

The transition from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene required humility, imagination and a willingness to see humans not as masters of Nature but as participants within it.

When asked which shifts mattered most, the panellists offered nuanced versions of a shared answer.

Albrecht spoke of recognising humanity as part of a vast web of symbiotic and more-than-human relationships. Rich reflected on the importance of understanding that humans are not at the top of the hierarchy, while Das argued that we’re “not self-reliant but codependent.”

Different disciplines.

Different languages.

Same idea.

The Symbiocene is not a utopia.

It’s a civilisation remembering that life works best when it’s lived through relationships — with Country, with each other, and with the interconnected living systems that make all life possible.

As McEoin concluded:

“Once you start thinking towards the Symbiocene, you’re already in it.”