We were asked by the clients, Circular Open exhibition producers E tu and Ulla-Britta Westergren, to produce a website that reflected their strong focus on circular design, repurposing and knowledge sharing.

To us, open source – both the coding and the ethos behind the community – is the ultimate circular system.

Symbiote has always used and contributed to open source technologies, finding it satisfying to share things we’ve enhanced or improved, and to benefit from other developers’ excellent code. 

We loved the Circular Open project proposal because the designers’ ethos of design resilience and the reusable nature of materials dove-tailed with our own values and approach. Read more about the project's manifesto here.

“When we thought about the connection between what we do and what designers across architecture, industrial, textiles and fashion design do, we realised that, while they work with actual material, for us, code is our material.” 

Code’s a material that brings colour, design, sound, movement, ideas, information and human connection into people’s lives, via their digital devices.

To us, code isn’t dull strings of symbols on a screen, it’s a series of rich languages – languages with libraries we write, edit and borrow from. These languages tell machines how to help human beings to make and share things, save time, find information, solve problems and talk to other people. 

So, seeing the connection between the design industry and our own, was fascinating. People are the priority in both industries. 

The end result of this project was a slick, gorgeous website that we created using Larvel-based PyroCMS. And, satisfyingly, by using this relatively new framework we are able to share and make the entire code of the website available to the PyroCMS community and to anyone who wants a fully working example website.

In web design we use code as our material. Our creative and logical skills are applied to this material to cut it, share it, recycle it and repurpose it. There are so many parallels between what we do and what other parts of the design industry do, that it was a natural fit for us to make a website for an offshoot of Melbourne Design week, using a new framework – and to give it away.

The website we made for Circular Open ticked a lot of boxes for us: 

• Open source code and the creative re-use of materials – we’ve had a commitment to the open source community since we started our company, Symbiote, 12 years ago. We regularly use, re-use, create and share code with other developers. Working on this project to showcase all kinds of designers who re-use materials seemed like a nice fit for our ethos.   
• Learning new things – in this case, our whole team took on the challenge to quickly learning a new language, PyroCMS, for this project. This whole-of-company project started with a hackday to spread the load of evaluating all the potential CMS options against this project brief.
• Contributing to the community – we contributed an elegant site for Melbourne’s design community and made it available for anyone to download it and use the code however they like. There weren’t many example projects made using the PyroCMS language, so we were happy to contribute ours to the open source community.
• Making creative projects – we’re fortunate to do a range of creative and corporate work. This means we approach every job as a challenge to allow us to use the most reliable, flexible and easily maintained technical smarts ‘under the hood’ while giving site visitors beautiful, modern, engaging design.

Play. 

Play was our secret ingredient in this project. 

That’s not to say that it didn’t involve a lot of hard work, however our team showed what can be accomplished with a sense of fun, camaraderie and desire to learn new things by asking, ‘How can we …’ and ‘Show me how you …’