2023 DATES
Melbourne Design Week shifts its festival dates to 18-28 May in 2023, which bolsters the city’s cultural capital leading into the colder months. The festival celebrates design in an annual 11-day program of talks, tours, exhibitions, launches, installations, and workshops across Australia’s design capital.
Melbourne
Design Fair
COLLECTIBLE
CONTEMPORARY
DESIGN
18 – 21 MAY 2023
Melbourne Design Fair showcases the best collectible design from Australian and international designers and makers with presentations staged by leading commercial galleries, studios, design organisations, and agencies in addition to a highlight exhibition of works for sale curated by the NGV Department of Contemporary Design and Architecture.
MELBOURNE ART BOOK FAIR
18 – 28 MAY 2023
In 2023, the first weekend sees the popular Stallholder Fair held at NGV’s Great Hall featuring the work of artists, designers and publishers. Throughout the festival, satellite events will take place in bookshops, galleries, libraries, community centres, public gardens and design studios around metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria. Applications to participate in MABF 2023 are now open.
2023 THEMES
Melbourne Design Week celebrates the 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’. This provocation asks designers to think outside the status quo in order to face the multiple challenges that encircle us: loneliness, climate disasters, social inequity, and the cost-of-living. Each year, three pillars sit under this call-to-action to address the ever-changing opportunities and challenges that designers face. In 2023, these pillars are transparency, currency and legacy, which ask participants to think over time and scale to design the world they want.
TRANSPARENCY
With the complex challenges that surround us, the world demands an openness in how designers work in order to involve more people, and things, in problem-solving. This pillar asks designers to unveil their design processes, share knowledge and engage with the agency of others. It also demands that designers be honest and responsible with the materials they use: from its extraction to its afterlife.
CURRENCY
Currency is a medium of exchange that prioritises an economic value. Financial currency constructs the world, but this value is artificial and assumed. There are many other values to consider, such as social, environmental, cultural, natural and political currency. This pillar explores how designers are rewiring systems of exchange to define what is a current value.
LEGACY
Design reinvents itself for the market: The search for innovation can be transformational. It’s also an opportunity to give up bad habits. But underpinning every brand, service, product and object is the continuation of a particular value that transcends time. This can be financial or material, but it could also be an ethical position. Designing for legacy ensures that impact of design lasts long after we are gone. What kind of ancestor do you want to be?
2022 VIDEOS
2022 VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS
