Melbourne Design Week 2025

Melbourne Design Week (MDW) celebrated design in an annual 11-day program of talks, tours, exhibitions, launches, installations, and workshops across Australia’s design capital. The program was driven by ideas through providing a platform for designers, educators, enthusiasts, thinkers, and businesses to come together to share these ideas, show and sell new work, and consider how design can be used as a force for good in an increasingly complex and precarious world. In 2025, MDW occurred during 15-25 May.

MDW took place across ateliers, studios, retail spaces, universities, galleries, gardens and public spaces throughout Melbourne and regional Victoria. Participation in the satellite program is via an expression-of-interest. The democratic access to participation and attendance in the program has enabled MDW to cultivate an international reputation for promoting design discourse, fostering critical thinking, and encouraging Australia’s design sector to embrace their moral responsibility and professional capability to shape the future collaboratively. Additionally, this approach has built capacity within the design sector by supporting both emerging and established designers.

Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. Since 2017 the program has grown in scope and scale from just under 100 programs in 2017 to over 400 in 2024. Over 100,000 people attended the 2024 festival making it Australia’s leading and largest design event.

The 2024 iteration of Melbourne Design Week also cemented the festival as a key design event in the Asia-Pacific region. In terms of scale the festival is now on par with international programs such as Paris Design Week (around 300 events; 60,000 visitors), Shanghai Design Week (around 350 events; 90,000 visitors), New York Design Week (around 300 events; 90,000 visitors) and Dubai Design Week (around 350 events; 90,000 visitors).

Presentations that have premiered in Melbourne Design Week have gone on to be recognised nationally and internationally, including through the Créateur Design Awards, Dezeen Awards, Designers Australia Awards, Victorian Premier Design Awards. and the Australian Institute of Architects Awards program.

Design the world you want

Design is powered by creativity. Enriching culture and society, design allows us to express, question, propose and test ideas about life, and in the world.

The scope for design is boundless: design intersects economics, health, science, ecology and technology – right across the spectrum. Design is everywhere.

In reaction to the growth in the influence, complexity and ubiquity of design, Melbourne Design Week calls for meaningful opportunities for the public, government, industry and the design sector to meet on common ground, and to experience, examine, communicate and think about design.

Since 2021, Melbourne Design Week has celebrated this potential of design to transform our environment – from the inside our homes to the entire planet – with the call-for-action for individuals and organisations to ‘Design the world you want’. MDW2025 continues this theme asking designers, architects and creatives to explore the capacity for design to transform existing paradigms and create a better tomorrow. Responding to this call-to-action, designers are invited to use their skills to drive positive change, offering innovative solutions to economic, social, and ecological challenges.

For 2025 we ask participants to consider projects that might offer solutions that heal, replenish, and enable life, revealing design as an act of repair and transformation.

As we look to the future of our city, suburbs and regions – and further to a global community with shared responsibilities – innovative design becomes a key to a better tomorrow. Melbourne Design Week 2025 is the time to look together towards the world we might make through design. Design the world you want.

Melbourne Design Week is underpinned by five core principles developed by Creative Victoria as part of the Creative State 2025. These are:

• First Peoples first (including the 11 Guiding Principles of Aboriginal Self-Determination)
• For every Victorian
• Whole of state
• Health and wellbeing, and
• Environmental impact

For more information about the Creative State 2025 Strategy visit Creative State 2025

The Melbourne Design Week Award, presented by Mercedes-Benz, is an annual prize celebrating an exceptional contribution to Australia’s premier design event.

The Melbourne Design Week Award is a significant recognition of creative excellence within the local and international design community. Each year, the award highlights designers that thoughtfully and effectively respond to the Melbourne Design Week theme, celebrating innovation and originality. Winners are acknowledged for their impactful contributions to the event and receive a cash prize generously supported by Major Partner Mercedes-Benz.

2025 winner: Volker Haug Studio

Volker Haug Studio is a decorative lighting practice based in Melbourne. A skilled team of designers and makers work to create lighting informed by a sense of discovery and experimentation. With a focus on pared back, immaculate designs filled with a sense of playfulness and individuality, the studio has established a tradition of producing elegant, finely detailed pieces. Designed to stand the test of time, each piece is made to order and customisable. In addition to the decorative ranges, the design team collaborate on site-specific projects and limited editions. The studio’s work features in projects by internationally renowned architects and designers.

For Melbourne Design Week 2025, Volker Haug Studio celebrates its twentieth anniversary with an exhibition displaying its distinct design language — one that balances simplicity, craftsmanship, and functionality. Their three-day exhibition offers a rare opportunity to reflect on that journey, featuring a curated selection of works loaned from the private collections of the homes where they were originally placed. From formative early pieces to more recent designs, the retrospective traces the studio’s evolving philosophy, revealing a continuous dialogue between material, form, and innovation.

2024 winner: A&A

Adam and Arthur (A&A) are acclaimed for their significant contributions to Melbourne Design Week and the Australian design industry. Since 2017, their collaboration has produced contemporary furniture blending historical craft techniques with modern aesthetics. Adam’s designs, enhanced by Arthur’s mastery of straw marquetry—a technique from the 1600s using premium rye straw from Burgundy, France—feature unique patterned veneer surfaces. For Melbourne Design Week 2024, A&A introduced their most ambitious work, The Kissing Cabinet, at Tolarno Galleries. This piece reflects their interest in mechanical furniture, made popular in the 1800s, which integrated design, engineering, and craftsmanship in items like cabinets and desks with hidden compartments. The Kissing Cabinet serves as a modern homage, transforming to reveal a hidden compartment before closing into the shape of ‘kissing lips’.

2023 winner: Paula Savage

Paula Savage is a senior Mualgal artist from Moa Island in the Torres Strait renowned for her ability to bring to life the enduring traditional material practices of her cultural heritage. Savage presented three extraordinary works – Dollar Reef, No 3 Reef and No 2 Reef – at the Melbourne Design Fair as part of the FOCUS exhibition, which brought to attention the skills and conceptual prowess of five accomplished Australian female designers. Through these works, Savage shares stories of her home in the Kubin community on Moa Island and the reefs off the coast of Lag Mua. The three works were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria.

2022 winner: Revival Projects, led by Robbie Neville

Revival Projects received the MDW Award for its exhibition Zero Footprint Repurposing. Led by Robbie Neville, the innovative building company established one of the world’s first free repurposing hubs during the festival. Located in Collingwood, the hub offers the design and construction industry a space to store salvaged demolition materials for reuse, giving them a second life instead of sending them to landfill. Since its debut during the festival, the hub has expanded its impact by creating Australia’s only inner-city timber mill at the same site.

2021 winner: A New Normal, curated by Finding Infinity

The exhibition A New Normal exhibited fifteen ideas by Melbourne’s leading architects and designers to transform Greater Melbourne into a self-sufficient city by 2030. The designs, which included 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. Following the success of the Melbourne exhibition, the A New Normal project has been developed for Sydney, Perth and Guadalajara, and nine of the Melbourne projects have moved beyond speculation and are now progressing toward real-world implementation.

2020 winner: Georgia Nowak and Eugene Perepletchikov

Georgia Nowak and Eugene Perepletchikov won the inaugural Mercedes Benz Design Week award in 2020 for their work Aurum, which explored their complex relationship with gold through the medium of film. This film was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and was exhibited at Sampling the Future at NGV Australia in 2021-2022.

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