Words and photos thanks to Melbourne Design Week.

Melbourne Design Week is taking over showrooms, galleries, museums and public spaces in Australia’s design capital to celebrate the diverse ways design can work towards a better future for people and the planet.

Sharefolder Fantasy

Sharefolder Fantasy is a new exhibition by Australian designer Dale Hardiman and American artist and designer Mark Dineen. Dale and Mark invited anyone from around the world to make a vase from any material they could source with the goal of creating an opportunity to observe the inflections of local materials, cultures, and customs on work from around the world.

View the exhibition at www.sharefolderfantasy.com

Up to Us: Bringing women together to design the world we want

Up to Us asks female collaborators from a range of disciplines to produce a creative response to the question: “What if it is up to us?”

Utopianism is fuel for transformation. It has long inspired women and collectives to come together, to create movements for change. At a time with extreme social, political and ecological uncertainty, it’s instinctive for designers to dream of utopian solutions. Being impractical can shift the impossible to inescapable, and is the only way to design the world we want.

Technology and digital design for civic good and social impact

An expert panel will explore the ways that technology can be designed and deployed for greater accessibility and improved health and wellbeing. This panel discussion will cover the challenges of optimising technology in complex settings, such as aged care and emerging developments in digital health for remote and regional communities in Australia.

Age-friendly design: who are we designing for?

Age-friendly design is being applied across local councils and cities in Australia and internationally. This conversation curated by Young Seniors + Co explores how the needs of older-aged citizens overlap with the needs of other groups in our community and considers an all-age inclusive approach to urban design.

Bark Ladies

Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala is an exhibition that celebrates the NGV’s extraordinary collection of work by Yolŋu women artists from the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre (Buku), in North-East Arnhem Land. Buku is the Indigenous community-run art centre located in Yirrkala, a small Aboriginal community, approximately 700 kilometres east of Darwin. Works by women from the Yirrkala region have been developing an appreciative audience, both nationally and internationally.

For more than two decades the NGV has been acquiring important works on bark by women artists from Buku, who before 2000 seldom painted on bark or made ḻarrakitj (painted hollow poles). Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala is an important exhibition that brings together great singular master artists and shares their important stories with a Melbourne audience.

ANT(E)ROOM

Ant(e)room is an interactive and immersive digital universe blending disciplines of architecture, 3D design, music and academic research. Taking its cues from the socio-spatial experiences of adolescence, which is itself a liminal age, this purpose-built, digital universe explores constructed augmented spaces centring around the spatial and political theme of liminality. As audiences navigate through the digital space they explore in-between realms, dream-worlds and a universe that reflects an oddly familiar moment in time.

Being impractical can shift the impossible to inescapable, and is the only way to design the world we want.

Melbourne Design Week is an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV. Want to check out the full program? More info here.