Novel Futures - Exhibition

Novel Futures – Exhibition, supported by FB IDEAs, presents early-stage concepts for novel habitats envisioned for future deployment across Fishermans Bend, as part of Melbourne Design Week 2025.

The centrality of cities and major urban centres to waterways globally presents significant challenges to the biodiversity and services of these systems. Their highly modified nature and often degraded appearance mean that one can overlook the biodiversity and potential for these sites to present nature-based experiences despite high levels of novelty.

Novel Futures is an exhibition of early prototypes and ideas to elevate the hidden biodiversity across the Birrarung at Fishermans Bend through the design and deployment of novel habitats. Focussing on novelty presented across the aquatic environments at Fishermans Bend, the exhibition explores ideas related to novel systems, habitats, and futures imploring participants to speculate and consider the role of design and ecology to reimagine systems that are beyond capacity by which they can be restored to a prior state.

Dates

Thu 15 May: 12 – 6pm

Fri 16 May: 10am – 6pm

Sat 17 May: 10am – 4pm

Participants

Shane Hunt
Shane is the founder of Haptera Design, a multidisciplinary design studio and consultancy working at the intersection of design and ecology. His research as a PhD candidate at RMIT University currently explores the potential for novel habitat deployment across degraded urban aquatic systems to elevate biodiversity and human experiences of these systems through speculation and deployment of structures across the Birrarung at Fisherman’s Bend.