Coming up: Melbourne Design Week 2025 – Australia’s largest design event

Robbie Neville, Founder, Revival. Projects with his exhibition 100 Circles on display at Warehouse 2, Revival Projects for Melbourne Design Week 2024. Photo: Tim Carrafa

Featuring a dazzling showcase of 100 elegant and avant-garde contemporary lights, furniture designed for neurodivergent audiences and leading designers and brands from across the country, Australia’s premier design festival Melbourne Design Week returns from 15 – 25 May 2025 offering a vital platform for creatives to showcase boundary-pushing work and test new ideas.

Over 11 days and 350+ events, exhibitions, talks, and installations, Melbourne Design Week will celebrate the depth and richness of design talent in the region from a new crop of emerging talent to the industry’s most well-respected and established professionals. Highlights include A New Normal an exhibition of designs to make Melbourne a self-sufficient city by 2030; a retrospective exhibition of lighting designer Volker Haug marking 20 years of designing and making in Australia; plus presentations by the country’s leading showrooms, studios and makers including Trent Jansen, Coco Flip, Jessie French, Fiona Lynch, Tait, Cult and more.

Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and is curated and delivered by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Melbourne Design Week continues to thrive year on year welcoming over 100,000 visitors to the 2024 festival, making it Australia’s largest design event.

An exhibition of 100 Lights will illuminate North Melbourne’s sweeping Meat Market Stables in a visually spectacular display of lighting designs by 100 artists, designers, and makers staged by Friends & Associates. Visitors will be immersed in a glowing environment replete with lamps, pendants and sconces made by emerging to late career practitioners including Adam Goodrum, Ross Gardam, Tantri Mustika, Marlo Lyda, Jay Jermyn and many more.

Two icons of the Australian industry, decorative lighting designer Volker Haug and furniture designer Trent Jansen, will mark 20 years of designing and making in Australia and innovative practice with retrospective exhibitions reflecting on their design legacies. Further highlights include Sibling Architecture’s Deep Calm, an exhibition that is the culmination of a year-long research project into how architecture can cater for neurodivergent audiences.

Installation view of Seeing Positive by Future Re Made presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024. Image courtesy of Future Re Made

A New Normal will present designs and policy recommendations by 12 Melbourne architects in an exhibition at the Boyd Baker Compound in Bacchus Marsh. Concepts proposed to transform Melbourne include a water treatment plant by MUIR in the form of public sculpture installed in local communities, Baracco + Wright’s proposal to transform abandoned buildings across the city into mixed-use spaces with residential housing, and NH’s waste-to-energy facility attached to local sports facilities. A New Normal won the Melbourne Design Week Award when it was presented on the rooftop of a high rise building in 2021. Architects Kennedy Nolan and NMBW have both completed projects utilising concepts from the 2021 exhibition and the project has gone on to be developed for Sydney, Perth and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Leading design studios, brands and showrooms will exhibit during the festival including lighting brand Objects For Thought presenting their first collaboration with Melbourne-based designer Jordan Fleming, Jardan will lead factory tours and repurposing workshops, plus presentations from KFive, Tait, Muji, Zuster, and Dowel Jones with Curio Practice.

Galleries across the city will activate with exhibitions including Sophie Gannon Gallery presenting the 9th annual Designwork exhibition this year showcasing pieces by established female designers Elliat Rich and Ashley Eriksmoen, Craft will stage a solo exhibition by Locki Humphrey using Prickly Pear leather to create objects and furniture, and Cordon Salon will have a solo presentation at Oigall Projects while upstairs Oigall: Design House 2 will be a group show of female designers taking over the domestic space above the Gallery.

Installation view of The Kissing Cabinet featuring designers Adam Goodrum and Arthur Seignur presented by Tolarno Galleries displayed from 25 May – 1 June at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne Design Week 2024. Image courtesy of A&A and Tolarno Galleries. Photo: Andrew Curtis

Highlighting the design ingenuity and legacy of First Nations designers, Artbank and Agency Projects will present Catch: Tales of First Nations fishing through the Artbank Collection an exhibition of fish traps by practitioners including Aunty Kim Wandin.

Beci Orpin will collaborate with custom furniture maker Softer Studios for her first foray into furniture design bringing her signature pop of colour and shapes to the collection launching during Melbourne Design Week.

The sustainable reuse of timber from urban trees will be the focus of programs exploring how to give new life to discarded trees and contribute this material to the circular economy. Exhibitions including the Robin Boyd Foundation’s Knot Pine exhibition of designs by Alexsandra Pontonio, Melbourne School of Design’s Tout le cochon, and Goodbye London Plane presented by Ma House Supply Store will all present new furniture designs using reclaimed urban timber.

The Melbourne Design Week Award, presented by Mercedes-Benz Australia for the sixth year running, will be awarded to a designer or project for their outstanding contribution to Australia’s largest international design event. The winner will be announced upon the opening of Melbourne Design Week. In 2024 award went to A&A who produced their most ambitious work The Kissing Cabinet.

Images supplied courtesy National Gallery Victoria

Melbourne Design Week takes place 15 – 25 May 2025 at NGV International, St Kilda Road, Melbourne and at various locations throughout metropolitan and regional Victoria.

The full program and bookings will be available online from mid- April 2025. The majority of Melbourne Design Week is free to attend with some events requiring bookings due to venue capacities. See designweek.melbourne