Theme

Design is powered by creativity. It enriches culture and society by allowing us to express, question, propose, and test ideas about life and the world around us. As design’s influence grows in complexity and ubiquity, Melbourne Design Week creates meaningful opportunities for the public, government, industry, and the design sector to come together to experience, explore, communicate, and reflect on design. At the heart of this is a commitment to engaging a broad public audience through events, exhibitions, and conversations that make design accessible, relevant, and impactful in everyday life.

Melbourne Design Week celebrates design’s transformative potential with the call to action ‘Design the world you want’ – from shaping our homes to influencing the entire planet. In 2026, the festival continues this theme, inviting participants to consider not only how we design the world we want today, but the legacy we leave for tomorrow.

While all ideas are encouraged, we are particularly interested in submissions that explore the legacy of Australian design that explore one or more of the following focus areas:

• Living legacy: Submissions that imagine the next chapter of Australian design and invite critical and creative reflection on our future legacy
• Australian-made: Projects that spotlight local design, innovation, retail, or manufacturing, including open studios or behind-the-scenes tours
• Luminaries: Submissions that highlight influential Australian designers, studios, and movements across time
• Design futures: Submissions that explore design as a restorative force: enabling biodiversity, healing communities, replenishing resources, and rebalancing human-nature relations
• Circularity: Submissions that foreground the shift taking place from linear, extractive, non-renewable design production to circular, non-extractive, or bio-design
• Tech-support: Submissions that explore a new wave of technologies created to extend care, broaden access, and promote fairness