We cannot design futures we cannot imagine

Don’t just regenerate. Generate.

Coined by Australian environmental philosopher Dr Glenn Albrecht, Symbiocene combines the Greek word symbiosis – living together for mutual benefit – with cene, meaning a new epoch. It imagines a future beyond the Anthropocene.

The Symbiocene is “a language of possibility”, Andy proposes. “It is a way to think and act in partnership with nature.”

The Anthropocene isn’t just a scientific label. It describes humans as the dominant geological force. The Symbiocene says something different: life exists through relationships. 

Dr Albrecht argues that language shapes how we understand the world. In his 2019 book, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, he defines solastalgia as the feeling of distress people feel as they witness destructive environmental change. The Symbiocene is an antidote to solastalgia. 

The word ‘sustainability’ is largely defensive. It asks us to preserve, minimise damage, reduce harm and do ‘less bad’. “The Symbiocene asks us to create new value,” Andy adds.

For people working in climate adaptation, the Symbiocene is a message of hope, Andy says.

“Climate adaptation is often framed around restoring what has been lost. But the climate has already changed.” We can’t just wind back the clock. Restoration looks backwards – and we must look forwards.

“We do need to regenerate. But let’s also generate new relationships with the natural world. This is adaptation.”

Why nature never stops at Plan A

One of humanity’s greatest achievements has become one of its greatest blind spots, Andy suggests.

“For millennia, life was challenging for human beings,” he says. We wanted comfort and convenience, security and simplicity, “but we’ve overcorrected”.

We’ve spent centuries trying to simplify a world that was never simple. “Nature is dynamic. It’s incredibly, beautifully complex.” Rather than trying to control this complexity, the Symbiocene Institute suggests we learn from it.

The Guide translates the Symbiocene into nine practical design principles. Some can be adopted immediately, such as embracing renewable energy and biomaterials. Others push practitioners towards deeper shifts, including designing within planetary boundaries and embracing ‘symbioship’ – our responsibility to care for the interconnectedness of life.

The art of doing more with more

One of the Guide’s most useful contributions is another piece of vocabulary: multi-solving. Nature rarely solves one problem at a time. The Guide shares various examples of multi-solving, where one action creates multiple benefits simultaneously.

Take the oyster reef restoration program led by the NSW Government Department of Primary Industries. Recycled oyster shells are used to rebuild reefs, but the benefits extend far beyond marine habitat. Oysters improve water quality, help stabilise shorelines, buffer storm impacts, support fisheries, strengthen local economies and sustain Indigenous cultural practices.

The Guide also highlights the work of Mexican furniture designer Fernando Laposse, whose collaboration with the Mixtec community has planted more than 100,000 agaves. The leaves are selectively harvested for their sisal fibres and transformed into handcrafted furniture, creating local jobs and preserving traditional weaving techniques while restoring degraded landscapes.

For Andy, these examples illustrate something deeper than clever design. “They represent a fundamentally different way of thinking about problems.”

Showing what good looks like

For much of the Industrial Age, we’ve designed for a single outcome: a house for living, an office for working, a car for driving. In doing so, we haven’t factored the true environmental and social cost of human activities, and “externalities” became someone else’s problem.

The Symbiocene Institute asks: What if nothing is an externality? A house, for example, isn’t simply shelter. It is a “regenerative engine”: a system that generates clean energy, purifies water and air, boosts biodiversity and health, provides habitat for animals and social space for humans.

“The Symbiocene is a way to see the deeper truth that we are interconnected, not independent of nature. Even as human beings, we house trillions of bacteria and microbes that we depend on. This interdependence is foundational and fundamental to life.”

Andy Marks, Executive Director and Founder, The Symbiocene Institute

The audience for this message extends well beyond architects and product designers. Anyone creating policies, services, infrastructure or places is, in effect, designing relationships between people and the natural world.

“People need hope – but they need hope with pathways to act. Our research has found introducing practitioners to Symbiocene approaches increases optimism by around 40%. People become more motivated because they see that change is possible, and that they can be agents of the change.”

We cannot design futures we cannot imagine. Sometimes it takes is a new word to begin.