Book Launch: Designing with Nature by Mick Abbott

We're delighted to invite you to the launch of
Designing with Nature by Mick Abbott.

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.

About Mick:
Mick Abbott is Director and founder of WildLab. He trained first as an architect, before working as lead equipment designer for Fairydown and Hallmark Brands. He was director and part-owner of Gondwana Creative Kits that designed, produced and distributed over 1 million kits, throughout NZ, Australia and beyond. Mid-career, he returned to University to study, research and teach landscape architecture. A former head of Lincoln University’s School of Landscape Architecture, he recently took early retirement to focus his efforts on WildLab. Mick is Emeritus Professor at Lincoln University, and currently a member of the NZ Conservation Authority, the NZ Geographic Board, and Federated Mountain Clubs Executive. Mick has had a lifelong connection with the outdoors including completing a 130 day solo traverse of the South Island that criss-crossed the main divide. For the past 30 years he and Carli Richter have been restoring a 45 hectare farm above Otago Harbour back into native forest.