2025's Melbourne Design Week Is Bringing Glowing Galleries, Sensory Furniture and Designer Basketball to Town
The city's biggest design festival is back, presenting both high-concept ideas and hands-on experiences across 350-plus events.
Melbourne Design Week is back for 2025 — and this year, it's shining brighter, digging deeper, and getting sportier than ever before. For its ninth edition, Australia's largest design festival — which last year welcomed over 100,000 people — will see more than 350 events popping up around the city between Thursday, May 15–Sunday, May 25, from dazzling light exhibitions and neurodivergent-friendly design to design debates, pop-up book fairs and even a designer basketball tournament.
The 11-day program is a love letter to creativity in all forms, presenting both high-concept ideas and hands-on experiences across architecture, lighting, furniture, publishing, sport and beyond. The event aims to showcase design thinking to all — whether you're a design die-hard or just keen for something interesting to do on the weekend, Melbourne Design Week is giving Melburnains and visitors alike the opportunity to explore the city in a whole new way.
Elliat Rich, Tones of Shimmer (Gravel) 2022. Image: Sara Maiorino
Among the more eye-catching installations is 100 Lights, which takes over North Melbourne's Meat Market Stables with a glowing gallery of contemporary lighting by 100 artists and makers, including Adam Goodrum, Ross Gardam and Tantri Mustika. At this immersive display curated by Friends & Associates, you'll find table lamps, pendants and wall lights that showcase both function and cutting-edge form.
Another fascinating highlight is Sibling Architecture's Deep Calm. This exhibition explores how design can support neurodivergent people, with a soothing showcase of weighted sofas and tactile rugs that represent the culmination of a year-long research project by the Curtin House-headquartered practice.
Image: Sibling Architecture
Events won't just be taking place in Melbourne, though. Bacchus Marsh will host exhibition A New Normal, which presents a suite of radical ideas by 12 Melbourne architects to make the city self-sufficient by 2030 — including public sculptures that double as water-treatment plants, waste-to-energy sports facilities, and adaptive reuse of abandoned buildings. The exhibition is set in the heritage-listed Boyd Baker House — one of Australia's most important modernist structures that collects its own water and features a design based on perfect geometry. A New Normal has become one of Melbourne Design Week's biggest success stories, with architects Kennedy Nolan and NMBW having both completed projects utilising concepts from the award-winning 2021 exhibition, and the project having gone on to be developed for Sydney, Perth and Guadalajara.
Elsewhere, two legends of Australian design will embark on a well-earned victory lap: lighting designer Volker Haug and furniture designer Trent Jansen, who will both mark 20 years in the game with retrospective shows tracing their significant creative legacies. At the NGV, Melbourne Art Book Fair (Thursday, May 15–Saturday, May 17) returns to the Great Hall with over 100 publishers and a special focus on Southeast Asian designers — plus free kids' storytime sessions led by local children's book authors under Yayoi Kusama's towering Dancing Pumpkin sculpture in Federation Court.
The program also features exhibitions exploring the sustainable reuse of timber from urban trees, typography shows, memorial-making workshops, curated book pop-ups, and, as part of Open House Melbourne, a two-day symposium called Beyond the Grave that delves into the architecture, places, issues and practices associated with the end of life.
And if you've ever wanted to shoot hoops with a furniture designer, you're in luck — this year's program includes a two-on-two basketball tournament for designers and design enthusiasts at a Reko Rennie-painted court in Cremorne. Our city's collective obsession with sport will be further explored at Reimagining the Clubhouse: Melbourne Design Week's 12-hour denouement featuring the works of eight designers that challenge the concept of a traditional sporting clubhouse. It'll also host a trophy-making competition and the official Melbourne Design Week closing party at Collingwood Yards' Runner Up bar.
Volker Haug, Fire Trees
Melbourne School of Design - Tout le cochon
Made Studio, OffCuts, Garrett In Workshop. Image: Alex Lark
Anton Gerner
Melbourne Design Week 2025 takes place between Thursday, May 15–Sunday, May 25 at various venues throughout Victoria. For more information and the full program, head to the event website.
Top image: Peter Bennetts, March Studio x Reko Rennie.
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