Nigerian architect Toshin Oshinowo to headline 2024 Melbourne Design Week

The National Gallery of Victoria has launched the program for the 2024 Melbourne Design Week, an 11-day schedule of more than 300 talks, tours, exhibitions, installations and workshops.

Themed "Design the world you want" the 2024 design week will focus on energy (how design can champion new technologies in the transition to renewables), ethics (how design can be guided by societal values), and ecology (how design can respond to the physical environment and the influence of nature).

Nigerian architect Toshin Oshinowo will be headlining the 2024 program with a keynote lecture on architecture and urbanism in the Middle East, Africa and Asia and diverse design approaches to meet cultural and climatic needs. Oshinowo founded Lagos-based Oshinowo Studio in 2013 and has completed a projects throughout Nigeria. She is known for her socially responsive approaches to architecture, design and urbanism. She was co-curator of the Lagos Biennial in 2019 and in 2023 she curated the second Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

The program also includes a satellite event presented by Open House Melbourne that will explore the relationship between design and death and how spaces of burial can provide insights on how we live.

Design week favourites including Melbourne Art Book Fair and the Melbourne Design Week Film Festival will also return, as well as the announcement of the Melbourne Design Week Award on the opening day. NGV and Stylecraft will also announce the Australian Furniture Design Awards on the eve of design week.

The winner of the 2022 Melbourne Design Week Award, Revival Project, will be back with an exhibition of 100 timber urns made from salvaged Cypress Macrocarpa trees from Box Hill cemetery.

Popular Youtube channel Never Too Small, which focuses on compact living, will present Multi-Functional Pet Furniture - a collection of designs that combine pet housing with aesthetics and affordability.

A public symposium on speculative designs for Birrarung/Yarra River will be held, ahead of an exhibition later in 2024 that challenges eight landscape architects to reimagine and reinvent sites along the river for 2070.

Also along the landscape architecture theme, the Urban Landscape Design Cake Competition invites landscape architecture studios to reimagine an underutilised site in the city as parkland in cake form.

Melbourne Design Week will also extend to regional Victoria with events in Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong and Shepparton.

The full program for the 2024 Melbourne Design Week will be available from 11 April. Events are free but some will require bookings.