ORGANIC MATTERS
Everyone is agreed! If we are to save our selves and the environment, we need, urgently, to reassess our relationship with our beleaguered planet; we need urgently to abandon our “Masters of the Universe” mentality and humbly accept that Nature has been creating a perfect, interactive system from single-celled organisms to complex ecosystems. Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide. Tipping points are too easily passed, institutional and political failure pushing us ever onwards to the cliff edge.
Some are already betting on the worse. Others of us, not so dystopian, are turning to technical and economic solutions to avoid collapse in the belief that nature and technology improve upon each other. That’s great, but shouldn’t we start by following nature’s very own, unadulterated model, applying its efficiency to create new ways to create and consume. Some thinkers and designers are already embracing organic principles emulating the way spiders work, growing materials as if plants, taking inspiration from nature’s patterns and colours. But, it doesn’t stop there…
A new aesthetic is taking hold blending the natural world with the spiritual and mystic, comprising colours that represent both the calming and dynamic facets of the natural world and offering products that combine both natural and futuristic elements. And talking of times to come, we are sitting on the brink of a new visual realm where we ponder a new nature reality as designers ask, “What will be the next natural colour?”
As Cotton Inc concluded in its own vision of S/S 2020, “Looking to nature as the true innovator as it inspires all industries from creative design to logistical engineering, our lens, through which we analyse and appreciate nature, is forever altered.”
