Houses magazine goes to Melbourne Design Week

More than 150 designers from across Australia and around the world will be showing their work at the Melbourne Design Fair, running from 18 to 21 May at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. The fair is an annual platform for designers, galleries, design agencies and organizations to promote and sell collectible design pieces. Pick up a beautiful piece of glassware from Adelaide's Jam Factory, a unique piece of jewellery from Munich-based Helen Britton or a transformative room divider from Melbourne designer Nicole Lawrence.

Waste Dream is an exhibition presented by Melbourne furniture store Cult Design in partnership with Mater, a Danish company specializing in circular-economy furniture. Mater makes furniture made from fibrous waste materials such as coffee bean shells, fishing nets, sawdust and beer kegs. Book in for a free guided exhibition tour with Mater's Ole Bjerg.

These three annual design exhibitions are prompted by one question: "What matters to you?" (No Things) Matters is the first in the series, followed by (Some Things) Matters and (All Things) Matters in the coming years. Taking over the ground floor of the Villa Alba Museum, the first instalment hosts "a tactile cornucopia of material samples, interpreted tools, experimental forms, and visual documentation."

Presented by Fitzroy gallery Oigåll Projects, Design House features 10 designers' works - not as detached objects on pedestals to politely examine, but as functional art performing its function. "Design often gets the shitty end of the stick, plopped into white wall galleries to be examined at a 40-centimetre to 1.5-metre clearance," says Oigåll Projects. "This is stupid. These objects inform our lives, improve them, sometimes inconvenience them but always enrich them. You need to pick 'em up, turn them on, move them out of the way of the screen while watching Below Deck Mediterranean Season 4. Not just look at them: get a chux on it, Daryl. See how she cleans up!"

Well-designed social housing creates "happier, safer, healthier and wealthier citizens." Responding to a new wave of high-quality social and affordable developments, this panel shines a light on the transformative potential of social housing. Presented by placemaking consultancy Village Well, the panel will include Vanessa Brotto, CEO of Haven: Home Safe; Jack Panton, director of Launch Housing; Jesse Judd, director of ARM Architecture; and Village Well CEO Valli Morphett.

Flack Studio presents this curated exhibition, which responds to the idea of gathering around a table. Works of art and design will facilitate conversation and connection through creative responses to the table and the memories, rituals and habits we associate with it.

Numbulwar Numburindi Arts, a collective of artists out of the east coast of the Northern Territory, is putting on a pop-up studio, exhibition and weaving circle in the Tait showroom. A focus of the collaboration will be an exhibition of master weavers Joy and Rose Wilfred's works, which reimagine Tait's iconic Tidal chair.