We asked the curatorial team behind Melbourne Design Week to reflect on the evolution and growth of the festival and what they feel most proud about.
Entering its ninth year, Melbourne Design Week (MDW) has cemented itself as a vital platform to showcase the diverse talent of Australian architects, designers, and makers. Organised by Creative Victoria in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the event has grown from 100 programs in 2017 to over 400 in 2024. Anchored at the NGV and extending across Victoria with multiple industry, education, and research partners, in 2024 MDW provided local designers and businesses with the opportunity to showcase the diversity and depth of Victorian design to the business community, the public and other (national and international) businesses, designers and design researchers. As a key pillar of the Victorian Government’s Creative State strategy, MDW consolidates Melbourne and Victoria’s status as a leading location of design business and industry in the Asia-Pacific Region, and Melbourne as the creative capital of Australia.
What makes Melbourne Design Week stand out is that the festival is ideas-driven and anchored by the annual theme "Design the world you want." This theme celebrates the transformative potential of design, urging participants to think beyond the status quo to address challenges such as the climate crisis, social inequity, and the cost of living. It invites designers to demonstrate what design can do, what more it can do, and how it can do things differently.
This drive sees the festival serve as an incubator for innovation, in providing a space for experimental work somewhat liberated from commercial pressures. For instance, in 2024, Melbourne designer Jessie French showcased her algae-based decal for AESOP's latest marketing campaign, offering a sustainable alternative to traditional PVC vinyl. This invention promises to revolutionise retail businesses, which consume single-use decals at a high rate. This builds on French's experiments in algae-based bioplastics, which have been exhibited in previous iterations of MDW.
The festival-as-incubator model is evident throughout the festival’s history. MDW2022 saw Australian building company Revival Projects create one of the world's first free hubs dedicated to the storage and reuse of demolished material by turning a warehouse set for redevelopment into a hub for repurposing construction and demolition waste. "For repurposing of existing materials to be a fundamental element of new design, storage of a large amount of demolished materials is necessary, often for many months or several years, while the project comes to life," Revival Projects founder Robbie Neville told Dezeen. "The idea of this costly storage is often a prohibitive issue, so we have offered the industry free storage of materials in our Collingwood space, if they are going to repurpose those materials back into their project." Revival Projects went on to win the Melbourne Design Week Award presented by Mercedes Benz for an exhibition in this space for inspiring designers to adopt simple re-use and recycle policies and influence legislative change by advocating for a legal framework that obliges developers and designers to handle existing materials responsibly.
Another transformative project from the festival was the A New Normal exhibition, curated by Finding Infinity in 2021. This exhibition featured 15 ideas from Melbourne’s leading architects and designers to make Greater Melbourne self-sufficient by 2030. The designs, which featured a sewage treatment plant that also functions as a nightclub and community hubs repurposed from multi-storey car parks, explored how sustainable technologies can enhance the city's health and liveability. Included with this ambitious exhibition was a $100 billion zero-carbon strategy for Melbourne "that would pay for itself in less than 10 years". Nine of these projects are now in progress, moving from speculative ideas to real-world applications. A New Normal also won the Melbourne Design Week Award in its year.
The Melbourne Design Fair was launched as part of MDW in 2023 to be an engine for experimentation in the upper-end of the furniture and object design sector, Curated by the National Gallery of Victoria and delivered in collaboration with the Melbourne Art Foundation, Melbourne Design Fair is now a biennial platform for designers, commercial galleries, design agencies and organisations to come together under one roof to promote and sell the best collectible design from Australia and the world, over four days, providing a unique cultural and commercial experience. Developed to stimulate long-term interest in the purchase of collectible design in Australia, Melbourne Design Fair’s audience constitutes a broad reach, encompassing art and design collectors, collecting institutions, interior design industry, and the public. Melbourne Design Fair is the only event of its kind in Australia, with the 2023 event generating an estimated $4.8 million in design sales.
Prototypes, pilots and experiments are essential for design innovation. They test and validate ideas, engage the public, and encourage risk and creativity. By serving as a testing ground for new ideas and connecting creative solutions with the public, business and government, design festivals like Melbourne Design Week play a crucial role in translating experimental designs into real-world change. By engaging audiences with the broader ecology of the design industry, an industry that contributes $6 billion annually to the state’s economy, MDW helps move the sector forward.
Melbourne Design Week Curatorial team
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