![Book Flatlay Cover Front Transparent Trio[1]](https://d31dpzy4bseog7.cloudfront.net/media/2024/06/07080212/Book_Flatlay_Cover_Front_Transparent_Trio1.png)
Melbourne Design Week 2025 – Design the World You Want
From avant-garde lighting to furniture that fosters relaxation, Melbourne Design Week 2025 offers a dynamic 11-day program that invites audiences to imagine – and design – the world they want.
Now in its ninth year, Melbourne Design Week is Australia’s largest annual design festival, curated and presented by the National Gallery of Victoria and an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. From 15-25 May, more than 350 events, exhibitions, installations, talks and workshops will take place across Melbourne and regional Victoria, spotlighting the creative ingenuity shaping the region’s future and providing visitors with the opportunity to witness the latest in design innovation across Australasia.
Anchored by the theme Design the World You Want, the 2025 program invited designers to consider how their creative output shapes the future. From end-of-life memorialisation in urban planning and furniture conceived for neurodivergent audiences to bold proposals for making Melbourne self-sufficient by 2030, this year’s festival tackles questions both intimate and expansive.
The breadth of the program is on full display across a series of standout events. ‘100 Lights’, staged at North Melbourne’s Meat Market Stables by Friends & Associates, presents a glowing field of contemporary lighting by more than 100 creatives, including Adam Goodrum, Coco Flip and Tom Skeehan. Meanwhile, two icons of the Australian design industry, Volker Haug and Trent Jansen, mark 20 years in practice with retrospective exhibitions exploring their respective legacies in lighting and object design.
Architecture and activism intersect at ‘A New Normal’, a five-day event at Boyd Baker House in Long Forest. Featuring 12 architects and their bold proposals for urban resilience – from community-scale water treatment to a fully electrified city – the event, which debuted at Melbourne Design Week in 2021, continues its trajectory from a rooftop experiment to a global platform for city-making.
Sibling Architecture’s ‘Deep Calm’ offers a meditative exploration into neurodiversity, translating sensory research into pieces like weighted sofas and tactile rugs that soothe stress and anxiety. In a different register of reflection, Open House Melbourne’s ‘Beyond the Grave’ symposium explores architecture’s role in memorialisation – across two days at the Shrine of Remembrance – where speakers will consider how places rich with history, culture or civic meaning become touchstones for our understanding of mortality and memory.
Further highlights include the 11th Melbourne Art Book Fair at NGV International from 16-18 May, featuring more than 100 Asia-Pacific publishers; ‘Dhawurr/Batjbarra (Fishtrap)’, an exhibition of Yolŋu fish traps and nets by practitioners including Aunty Kim Wandin; ‘Introducing Knotte’, which showcases three collections by new Australian furniture brand Knotte; and ‘A Material Endeavour’, featuring four installations at Aesop stores in the city that explore the algae-based bioplastics of Other Matter’s Jessie French.
Key conversations round out the program: Patrick Kennedy and Rachel Nolan of architecture studio Kennedy Nolan deliver the 2025 keynote at the NGV’s Great Hall, while Georgina Reid and Costa Georgiadis lead a panel on the cultural, social and ecological role of trees in Australia’s urban environments for ‘In the Trees’, also at the Great Hall.
In a first for Melbourne Design Week, organisers have introduced an event that weaves together sport, women’s safety and design. For Illuminating Darkness, runner and design creative Katie Kelso will lead a night run through Collingwood and Abbotsford – with all participants receiving a headlamp from Knog – as a way of highlighting women’s safety while running after dark.
Melbourne Design Week runs from 15-25 May at NGV International and venues across Victoria. Explore the full program here.
