National Gallery of Victoria Link to the National Gallery's website
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National Gallery of Victoria Link to the National Gallery's website
Creative Victoria Logo Link to the Creative Victoria website
Melbourne
Design Week
Great Wrap and Bayly Group Great Mate and Nudie Rol, Great Wrap and Bayly Group.
 
Since 2021, Melbourne Design Week has celebrated 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. Under this thematic, designers will demonstrate what design can do, what more it can do, and what can it do differently.

Themes

Design the world you want.

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. 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? 

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