Melbourne Design Week 2025: Local Peoples’ Top Picks
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Elliat Rich and her exhibition Mythica Ignota at Canberra Glassworks. Photo by Pew Pew Studio
By Alexi Freeman
As the days grow shorter and our parks become ablaze with autumnal hues, Melbourne Design Week (MDW) returns to burn brightly for 11 whirlwind days.
Running May 15 to 25, MDW2025 features over 100 exhibitions and 250 events, including talks, workshops, tours, performances and discursive dining experiences across design, architecture and related disciplines.
With over 100,000 people attending in 2024, MDW has cemented itself as one of the world’s premier design festivals – but with such a vast program, you may feel spoiled for choice.
To help simplify the choices for you, Local Peoples have sifted through this galaxy of events to highlight three must-sees that embody MDW’s theme “design the world you want” – a provocation inspiring creatives to speculate on how design can be harnessed as a powerful tool driving positive societal change.
This year’s offerings explore design’s role in social, ecological and cultural transformation, revealing design’s potential as an act of repair and transformation.
A New Normal, presented by Finding Infinity
Imagine waking up in 2030 to find Greater Melbourne reimagined as a self-sufficient city. Rooted in real-world change, A New Normal (ANN) demonstrates how to make this dream a reality.
Presented by Richmond-based creative consultancy Finding Infinity, their five-day program showcases real, implementable solutions through guided tours, talks, exhibitions and shared meals, held at the spectacular Boyd Baker Compound in Bacchus Marsh.
First launched at MDW in 2021, this fifth iteration of ANN presents 12 cross-disciplinary projects in collaboration with a broad swathe of leading architects, designers and changemakers.
Highlights include a public-sculpture-style water treatment plant in local communities by MUIR; Baracco + Wright’s proposal to transform abandoned buildings into mixed-use housing; and a waste-to-energy facility attached to local sports grounds by NH Architecture.
ANN’s extensive programming nourishes you with food for thought – and actual food – courtesy of their curated lunches in partnership with Hope Street Radio and Long Prawn.
Does it sound good? Be prepared – ANN is not for the faint-hearted – this eco-experience is a $300, full-day commitment, including catching an early chartered bus from a city location.
Presented in collaboration with the Robin Boyd Foundation, the program runs from May 19 – 23, 2025.
Marta Figueiredo’s Crip Time. Photo by Jonathon Griggs
If you’re after something closer to home (and gentler on the wallet), Marta Figueiredo’s latest artwork titled Crip Time Clock invites us to slow down and reflect on time, labour and the body. Figueiredo’s exhibition is conveniently located in the backstreets of Collingwood at Magma Galleries.
An Australian-Portuguese architect and multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne (Naarm/Birrarung-ga), Figueiredo’s practice spans speculative design, installation, and public art.
For this artwork, Figueiredo bravely draws on her lived experience juggling a demanding creative practice schedule whilst managing a chronic illness. Her work challenges dominant ideas of productivity and able-bodied time, proposing an alternate way of being.
Figueiredo’s artwork seeks to “foster empathy and spark conversations about conventional perceptions of time, productivity, and labour.”
Created in collaboration with Dr Elisabetta Crovara – a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Human Geography at the University of Melbourne – Crip Time Clock visually translates Crovara’s research exploring workplace transformation and skills transition, focussing on the lived experiences of disability and chronic illness.
Including an opening celebration, a Designer/Researcher in Conversation event on May 17 and seven live performances throughout MDW2025, there are numerous opportunities to engage with this empathy-building exhibition.
Crip Time is a free, accessible and inclusive event.
Elliat Rich’s Mythica Ignota at Canberra Glassworks. Photo by Pew Pew Studio
Created during a six-month residency with Canberra Glassworks, Mythica Ignotica by Central Australian designer Elliat Rich is a deeply philosophical suite of works that alchemises myth, science and sustainability.
Subtitled Artefacts of the Oscillocene and the Warawana Mythologies, the exhibition proposes a future-facing mythology to help us shift the values underpinning ecological harm.
Rich tells Local Peoples: “Mythologies are an observational and ethically-based cultural practice, providing a rich seam of possibilities when materials-based solutions will only get us so far. We need to shift some deeply embedded values that run counter to a just and sustainable human presence.”
Mythica Ignota applies mythology as a framework to nest scientific observation and more-than-human orientated values with artefact and narrative.
From the mythologies of a world unseen but present, Mythica Ignota presents a collection of portals to other ways to belong to and with the planet in this strange time, Rich dubs the Oscillocene.
Through science, story and the artefacts that hold them, myth becomes a daily ritual through objects that tether you to other ways of seeing, thinking, knowing and being.
Mythica Ignotica is a free, accessible and inclusive event opening May 17 and running until June 7, 2025, at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond.
Elliat Rich’s Mythica Ignota at Canberra Glassworks. Photo by Pew Pew Studio
Now in its ninth year, MDW2025 runs from May 15 to 25 across Melbourne and regional Victoria, offering a vital platform for creatives that celebrates experimentation, boundary-pushing and meaningful design ideas. MDW is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and is curated and delivered by the National Gallery of Victoria.
