Melbourne Design Week

Melbourne Design Week returns for its sixth edition, with an 11-day program of talks, tours, launches, installations and workshops across Melbourne and regional Victoria. The festival will activate a number of hubs including the National Gallery of Victoria, RMIT Design Hub, Collingwood Yards, Scienceworks, MPavilion and Melbourne Connect.

For 2022, the Melbourne Design Week program has been curated around two central ideas. The first, ‘civic good’, encourages participants to think beyond the individual, and consider the objects, buildings, designs and services that serve the common interest and help people to feel part of a community. The second, ‘making good’, considers the social impact of design, and the many ways that design processes, production and materials can be rethought through the lens of ethical and sustainable practice.

At the NGV, the Melbourne Art Book Fair’s stallholder fair returns between March 18 and 20, with over 70 stalls showcasing their wares in the Great Hall. (There’s also a program of MABF satellite events for the duration of Melbourne Design week.) At RMIT Design Hub, designers Dale Hardiman and Tom Skeehan’s curatorial practice Friends and Associates presents a multi-disciplinary group show entitled Self Portrait. At MPavilion, a range of conversations explore everything from the politics of the beauty salon and designing the nightclub to Indigenising the built environment and making skateboarding more inclusive through design.

At the University of Melbourne on Saturday March 26, head down to the Festival of Publicness, a one-day program of talks, workshops and music exploring ideas of public space. At Melbourne Connect, a series of events explore the intersections of design and science, while over at Collingwood Yards a series of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led conversations presented by Agency Projects reflects on traditional and contemporary design processes and practices that are integral to community, sustainability and Country. Elsewhere in Collingwood, visit the Zero Footprint Repurposing Hub by Revival Projects and Grimshaw, showcasing large-scale material repurposing initiatives in construction and architecture. Other highlights of the mammoth program include Open Nature, Open House Melbourne’s program of walks, talks, tours and events; Cult Design’s Chairity project; Public Works by Monash Architecture; Blak Jewellery at the Koorie Heritage Trust, celebrating contemporary jewellery by First Nations artists; and the annual NGV Architecture Commission, this year by Taylor Knights and James Carey.

This is also the first year that Melbourne Design Week will extend to Castlemaine and Ballarat, with a series of events including performance and poetry at Midtown Cellars and Bar in Ballarat, a regional Art Book Fair at Castlemaine Art Museum; and much, much more. Another first this year is the inaugural Melbourne Design Fair, a commercial showcase of limited edition, rare and one-of-a-kind collectible design by Australia’s leading emerging designers and makers.

Head to the Melbourne Design Week website to browse the full program of events. (Hot tip: use map view to navigate by location.)

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of the NGV