Today the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) launched the ninth edition of Melbourne Design Week, Australia’s largest design event, running from 15-25 May 2025. 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 offers 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.
The 100 LIGHTS exhibition, staged by Friends & Associates, played host to the launch of Melbourne Design Week, illuminating North Melbourne’s sweeping Meat Market Stables in a visually spectacular display of lighting designs by 110 artists, designers, and makers. Visitors were 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.
At the launch, Mercedes-Benz Australia presented the sixth annual Melbourne Design Week Award to Volker Haug recognising the designer and his studio’s outstanding contribution to the Australian design industry. From 15-17 May, Volker Haug Studio will present 20 Years of Volker Haug Studio, an exhibition reflecting on two-decades of practice traversing the development of the Studio’s practice and their exploration of material, form and lighting innovation.
Also marking 20 years of practice will be one of Australia most accomplished designers Trent Jansen who will present an exhibition titled Trent Jansen: Two Decades of Design Anthropology. The exhibition will traverse his early works repurposing road signs into stools to his groundbreaking collaborations with First Nations makers such as designers Johnny Nargoodah, Errol Evans and Tanya Singer, and artist Maree Clark.
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. Weighted sofas and tactile rugs designed by Sibling will create the calming effect of deep pressure widely used by occupational therapists working with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to reduce symptoms of stress and anxiety.
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.
The Hon. Colin Brooks, Minister for Creative Industries, said: “The Allan Labor Government is proud to support Melbourne Design Week 2025, delivered by the NGV, which will explore the vital role design plays in all of our lives now and into the future. We encourage the design community and everyone interested in the power of good design to get involved.”
Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: “Now in its ninth year Melbourne Design Week is a vital platform for designers from across the country and the Asia-Pacific region to share ambitious ideas and new works that will shape the future for the better.”
The 11th iteration of the Melbourne Art Book Fair brings together the best publishers and designers from the Asia-Pacific region from 16 – 18 May at NGV International. The fair plays host to over 100 publishers in the Great Hall where visitors can browse booths limited edition books, prints, magazines and more. This will include Newsstand, an offering of free, limited-edition print editorials by a selection of creatives honouring the history of independent press.
A strong presence from Southeast Asian publishers will offer visitors to the Stallholder Fair perspectives on what is shaping contemporary art and design publishing in the region. The diverse selection of makers includes Cahyati Press from Indonesia; Thailand-based Spacebar Zine; Malaysian architecture book retailer and publisher Suburbia Projects; and Singapore and London based imprint KOVA.
Also at the Stallholder Fair, interactive experiences will include Books By The Gram, a tongue in cheek approach to selling cookbooks presented by Long Prawn where visitors can browse a selection of Long Prawn publications and purchase individual recipes or sections of the books for $1.99 per gram.
A major highlight of the Melbourne Art Book Fair satellite program will be Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line an exhibition of internationally acclaimed New Zealand artist, designer and typographer 40-year practice which explores the intersection of typography and language in public space. Griffiths’ work reconfigures typographic context and meaning through word-play, shifts in scale, and immersive experiences, altering how viewers perceive and interact with language.
Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and is curated and delivered by the 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.
The reoccurring theme of ‘Design the world you want’ invites designers showing in the festival to consider how their creative output shapes the future.
Further highlights in the program include:
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.
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.
Further exploring the theme of urban trees NGV will present a talk hosted by Gardening Australia’s host Costa Georgiadis and Wonderground editor Georgina Reid which will unpack the cultural, ecological and social power of trees in our urban spaces.
In a first for Melbourne Design Week, a series of events will focus on developing industry connections through organised sport as designers seek to engage with their industry colleagues in new ways. A run club will take participants on night run led by creative Katie Kelso, exploring how urban design intersects with safety for women runners. The event includes a pre-run Q&A with Katherine Newton and Tom Robertson of V1 Studios, where they discuss the HER Move campaign empowering elite female athletes via financial support and the safety issues women face when running.
The festival will culminate with a 12-hour exhibition titled Reimagining the clubhouse, by Found Golf, Katie Kelso and Good Sport Magazine featuring works by eight designers that challenge the traditional concept of a sporting club house. The event will include a trophy making competition and a Design Week closing party at Runner Up bar in Collingwood Yards.
Returning to the theme of design and death for a second year, Open House Melbourne will present Beyond the Grave a two-day symposium focused on the architecture, places, issues and practices associated with the end of life. The symposium will commence at the Shrine of Remembrance, reflecting on the role of memorials in urban planning and the future of cemetery design. This will be followed by workshops guiding participants to plan a memorial and a floral design workshop focused on how to honour a loved one.
The Melbourne Design Week Film Festival offers an opportunity to be immersed in design through a series of films curated by Spiros Economopoulos and screened at Lido and Classic Cinemas. Highlights include documentaries on leading female architect of the Modernist Movement Eileen Gray, and Arthur Erickson, a leading architect whose iconic and queer legacy is little known in this country.
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 is available via the Melbourne Design Week website: designweek.melbourne
The majority of Melbourne Design Week is free to attend with some events requiring bookings due to venue capacities.
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