WHAT TO SEE AT MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK 2026

Looking forward rather than backward, the 2026 program positions design as a force shaping technology, furniture, food, fitness, and the built environment. In 2025, the event drew over 100,000 attendees. The room, as they say, is full.

Here is where to direct your attention.

For the big room: Shunji Yamanaka at the National Communication Museum

Japanese industrial designer Shunji Yamanaka will deliver a keynote at the National Communication Museum, presenting work that traverses prosthetics, robotics and product design. His JIZAI ARMS project, wearable robotic limbs that integrate with human movement, sits at the intersection of engineering and the deeply personal question of what bodies can become. It is the kind of work that shifts the frame.

For the discipline: Australian Furniture Design Award at Stylecraft

Presented by Stylecraft and NGV, the Australian Furniture Design Award responds to the 2026 theme "Living Well, Living Small," with a $20,000 prize and development opportunity; finalists' works are exhibited at Stylecraft's new Collins Street showroom, with the winner announced on the 13th of May. The AFDA is not a celebration of what Australian furniture design has achieved. It is a live brief for where it is going.

For the discourse: David Flack in Conversation

David Flack, founder of Flack Studio, one of Australia's most internationally recognised interior architecture practices, reflects on the projects that have shaped his career, sharing candid insights into his own work and the designers he most admires in a one-night-only event.

For the long view: Alison Page at Melbourne School of Design

A keynote and exhibition at Melbourne School of Design marks 25 years of practice by Alison Page, foregrounding Blak design methodologies and their capacity to shape everyday Australian life. In the context of a festival that asks designers to imagine the world they want, it is the most necessary event in the program.

For the page: Melbourne Art Book Fair at NGV International

The Melbourne Art Book Fair transforms NGV International's Great Hall into a marketplace for local, national and international publishers. This year's fair highlights the work of imprints from Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Australian Chinese diaspora: voices that have long been peripheral to the mainstream Australian design conversation, and shouldn't be.

For the craft: Goblets & Chalice Presented by Studio Dokola

This exhibition brings together vessels made by participants in a glassblowing masterclass led by Drew Spangenberg, hosted across Studio Dokola and Gordon Studio Glassblowers. Each work sits at a point where utility meets uncertainty – cups, bottles and forms that appear familiar yet carry the decisions, pressures and moments of risk embedded in their making. Shaped through shared instruction and sustained practice, the vessels speak to craft as something learned collectively and understood through doing. For viewers, the pleasure lies in recognising everyday forms while sensing the time, judgement and quiet perseverance they hold.

Must-see: Tall Poppy Curated by Tiffany Jade

And then there is the exhibition that opens before the week begins and outlasts it entirely.

Tall Poppy opens on 29 April at Kelli Lundberg Art in Moorooduc, and it is, without qualification, the exhibition to make the trip for.

Stemming from a conversation writer Tiffany Jade had with Adam Goodrum for a 2024 Open Journal interview, the premise is not complicated, but it is urgent. Fifteen Australian designers, working across furniture, objects, textiles, and lighting. A gallery on the Mornington Peninsula that has established itself by quietly, rigorously presenting creative work as a serious discipline rather than a decorative afterthought. And a curatorial argument that cuts to something this industry has largely preferred not to say aloud: that Australian design talent leaves, because the conditions to stay and flourish have rarely been made available.

The title is not decorative either. The tall poppy is the thing that grows past the field line and gets cut. The exhibition asks what happens when you refuse the shears.

The fifteen designers in Tall Poppy share a quality of work with the specificity of a vision that is recognisably, irreducibly Australian, not in a folkloric sense, but in the way that a practice shaped by this light, this landscape, this particular cultural negotiation between restraint and abundance, produces objects that couldn't have come from anywhere else.

This is not a survey show. It is a proposition that seeks to sharpen your eye.

Melbourne Design Week runs 14–24 May 2026. The full MDW program is available on their website.