Designing with nature

Walking the Milford Track as a nine-year-old, Mick Abbott encountered something he had no words for yet - a natural world so much bigger and wilder than himself that it left a permanent mark. That encounter, and many that followed in the untracked forests and high tops of Aotearoa New Zealand, never left him.

Designing with Nature is the answer thirty years of practice has been building toward. It is part personal memoir, part design inquiry - moving between the backcountry that has shaped Abbott throughout his life, and more than thirty design projects across Aotearoa New Zealand that have tested what a different relationship between people and nature might actually look like on the ground.

Projects range from a former mining site on the Punakaiki coast being restored through the acts of locals and travellers, to kaki breeding in the Mackenzie Basin, to the reimagining of Christchurch's Otakaro Avon River after the earthquakes. Each is introduced through a personal story. None offers a tidy resolution. Together they ask what kind of economy, what kind of society, and what kind of imagination could make places where people and nature genuinely thrive together.

This is not a textbook or a manual. It is an invitation - to design differently, and to let nature be the one shaping your thinking.