Here's what to see + explore at Melbourne Design Week 2023

Melbourne Design Week 2023
Here's what to see + explore

Melbourne Design Week is an annual event that highlights the best of Australian design and architecture, showcasing innovative and engaging projects. From May 18th to May 28th, the 11-day event will take place in Melbourne and regional Victoria, featuring exhibitions, talks, films, tours, and workshops.

Melbourne Design Week is Australia’s largest annual international design event, offering a platform for emerging and established design practitioners to showcase their talents. The NGV’s Department of Contemporary Design and Architecture is leading the way, exploring the theme of “design the world you want.” This year, the program will introduce three new pillars: transparency, currency, and legacy, designed to stimulate reflection and investigation.

Alongside Melbourne’s leaders in design, BETA By STH BNK will be opening its doors for a series of events that aim to inspire change and model the possibilities of the future.

BETA By STH BNK presents
Circular Basket Weaving Workshop

Come spend a relaxing afternoon immersed in making colourful sculptural forms from post-consumer materials. Created from largely recycled and reclaimed materials, Sienna will teach you how to make a small coiled basket using her lovingly curated colour palette. Attendees will leave with: the skills to make their own hand-woven basket (and an instructional pamphlet in case they forget), a finished basket or enough materials to finish their vessel at home.

BETA By STH BNK presents
Future From Waste Lab Open Studios

The future of fashion retail is imagined via a workshop centred around transparency, where visitors can witness the creation of limited edition garments in-sitchu from post-consumer textiles. View the entire process of regenerative fashion production, and speak with the team about the fashion waste life cycle and how the Future From Waste Lab will help sow the seeds for a seismic shift in thinking and diverging from the traditional linear narrative of ‘buy, wear, dispose of’ into a fashion future that is sustainable, circular, and transparent.

BETA By STH BNK presents
The Future Supermarket

Visitors will experience a retail shop prototype from the future. Curated, unique, constantly adaptive, Hanover House is a beacon for both the retail and creative communities. A dynamic hub of social activity, it’s a fluid and adaptive space where designers, retailers and brands can co-create and grow. During MDW, visitors will be able to move through various areas within Hanover House, each offering a different prototype of the future retail.

Registrations are essential and more information is available here.

With so much to explore across the week, read on to find out which events the BEULAH team are looking forward to attending!

Collectivity Talks presents
Adaptive Reuse: Redefining the Melbourne Skyline Through Sustainable Design

Moderated by Alice Blackwood, this event will bring together different stakeholders in the Melbourne built environment to discuss how to better enable the commercial viability of adaptive reuse, the best practice in sustainable design, and the role it will play in enhancing our community and securing its environmental future.

Melbourne School of Design presents
Artificial Intelligence and Design Culture

The event offers a window into how designers and researchers from various design disciplines are engaging with new and emerging artificial intelligence technologies in their creative practices.

City of Melbourne presents
The Excellent City Series – Design Review In A Design City

Join the City of Melbourne for a panel discussion that focuses on the first principles of design review: What is it? Who is it for? What is its role? How is it informing design excellence in architectural education, research, practice and on the ground?

Speakers include private, public and academic practitioners. The discussion is chaired by the Director City Design at the City of Melbourne and followed by informal networking.

UnitePlayPerform presents:
Design Your Own Universe

UnitePlayPerform is activating a deliciously ambitious program full of participatory experiences that inspire play, co-creation, inclusivity, connection, community and radical self expression. The program is a full throttle fantasy including intimate Playshop sessions, performance lead experimental works and interactive durational experiences that invite you, the participant to engage and develop UPP’s Playkit collections and design your own universe.

Cult Design presents
WASTE DREAM | From Waste to Furniture | A Circular Design Exhibition by Mater x Cult

Cult is proud to present Waste Dream in partnership with Mater – the Danish company who are revolutionising circular furniture design. This exhibition explores how different waste streams from industrial production can become new materials in the furniture industry.

BETA is our testing ground for the future and presents Melburnians a model of what to expect from our transformative and visionary mini-metropolis, STH BNK By Beulah.

For more information about STH BNK By Beulah, visit here.