Design the World You Want: Melbourne Design Week Announces its 2021 Event Program.

Greenhouse by Joost Bakker. Photo: Earl Carter.

Broached Commissions, Broached Recall Monolith, 2020
. Photo: Claire Summers.

Jane McKenzie sculpture. Photo: Sarah Weston.

Future Inheritance by Marsha Golemac.

Melbourne Design Week, Australia’s leading annual international design event, is back this March with a fifth consecutive iteration, marked by its most extensive program to date. Presented by Creative Victoria in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria, the 2021 festival features 11 days of more than 300 exhibitions, talks, films, tours and workshops across Victoria and online exploring the theme “Design the world you want”.

Team Yellowtrace would usually be boarding the plane to Milan at this time of year, but since the global pandemic had other plans for us all, we’re excited to be able to head to Melbourne instead. Finally! We’ll be making a b-line for many events spread across a series of venues from 26 March until 5 April 2021.

Encompassing the full breadth of the design sector – from the industry’s most respected designers, emerging practitioners to small independent studios – Melbourne Design Week celebrates Australian design and architecture diversity. The event offers both industry professionals and design enthusiasts the opportunity to engage with local, national and international practices at the vanguard of innovation worldwide.

The 2021 festival has been curated with three thematic pillars – Care, Community and Climate. Events under the Care thematic reflect the desire for design processes that consider the emotional needs of others, including other species; Community celebrates collaboration across disciplines, disseminating knowledge and embracing new cultures; and Climate examines how designers can mediate the effects of climate change and accelerate the necessary shift to a zero-carbon future.

Traversing both the physical and virtual worlds, the program also comprises an extensive digital offering accessible via a specially-designed digital platform, hosted on the Melbourne Design Week website and developed in collaboration with Mecca Medialight with a new brand design by 3-Deep.

Cordon Salon at Sophie Gannon Gallery. Photo: Tom Ross.

Highlights from the 2021 Melbourne Design Week program are probably too many to mention in this short article, but here are just some of the things we look forward to seeing during our visit:

+ A New Normal is a large shared exhibition venue that will host a series of programs and installations by some of Australia’s leading architectural practices, led by Finding Infinity, that challenges Melbourne to become an entirely self-sufficient city by 2030.

+ Greenhouse by Joost Bakker imagines solving the world’s biggest problems by simply changing the way we live. This project presents as a self-sustaining, zero-waste, productive house that demonstrates our homes’ potential to provide shelter, produce food, and generate energy. For two months, chefs Matt Stone and Jo Barret have lived in the house dubbed ‘Future Food Systems’ while attempting to live solely off the food and resources produced by it.

+ Featuring the work of more than 30 designers from Australia, Asia, and Europe, COMMUNITY, presented by alt.material, features never-before-seen work by the likes of Ron Arad, Thomas Heatherwick, David Thulstrup, Pascale Gomes-McNab, Tom Fereday & Kate Banazi exhibited within empty shopfronts across the City of Yarra.

+ After Hours presented by Volker Haug Studio is an exhibition that will explore the theme of collaborative design and its ability to bring ideas and people together. Creatives from varying disciplines will be given a “room” to exhibit their response to ‘the life of an idea’.

+ Designwork 05: Cordon Salon presented by Sophie Gannon Gallery is a solo exhibition of ‘puddle mirrors’, expanding on Melbourne studio’s previous experiments with traditional silvering methods.

+ Broached Recall presented by Broached Commissions is a collection of furniture pieces crafted by extracting precious timbers from cheap antiques that are undesirable or no longer considered fashionable – a comment on the design industry’s enormous contribution to the economics of extraction and flagrant consumerism.

+ Crafts, Crossovers and Collaborations by JamFactory is an exhibition of nine selected artists and designers, including Kristel Britcher and Andrew Carvolth, who celebrate materiality and process to tell the stories of human connection and collaboration.

+ Form From by Studio Flek will feature a series of bar stools made from the by-product of beer production, reintroducing the waste back into the space that created it.

+ A Sea at The Table presented by Other Matter and Fluff Corp is an exhibition of an algae-bioplastic dinner setting and a retail store selling bioplastic pieces. In a concurrent series of ‘translucent dinners’, food will be conceptually centred around the sea and transparency, highlighting the urgency for a post-petrochemical world.

“Good design has the potential to change the world – and this important provocation sits at the heart of this year’s Melbourne Design Week program,” says Tony Ellwood AM, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria. “Melbourne Design Week is a festival of ideas, offering industry and audiences alike the opportunity to reflect on the roles and responsibilities of design in 2021.”

An initiative of the Victorian Government and delivered by the National Gallery of Victoria, the inaugural Melbourne Design Week was launched in 2017. Melbourne Design Week 2021: Design the World You Want runs from 26 March to 5 April 2021. Explore the full program online at designweek.melbourne.

Form From: An exhibition of alternative materials in collaboration with nature. Photo Chris Miller.

This Yellowtrace Promotion is proudly supported by NGV. Like everything we do, our partner content is carefully curated to maintain the utmost relevance to our readers. Thank you for supporting the brands that support Yellowtrace. 

[Images courtesy of NGV.]