Auckland Design Week 2024: inside the first festival
From 10 to 16 March 2024, Auckland Design Week opened its doors for the first time. The brief we set ourselves was Bold + Brave, and it read as both a theme and a dare: a new event, brought to market in a matter of months, asking the design community to turn up for itself. Over 30 events ran across seven days, and by the final weekend the city had been reorganised into something you could walk, drive and queue for.
A week that ran on ideas
Our weekday programme was built out of talks, panels, walking tours and one film. Ethan Reid of LandLAB led ticketholders through Wynyard Quarter’s Tank Park and along Quay Street West, reading the waterfront as a designed thing rather than a backdrop. DJ Tai of Cheshire Architects walked people through The Hotel Britomart, Aotearoa’s first 5 Green Star hotel, and attendees were invited to a private tour of Faradays Parnell by designers of Cheshire, and artist Grace Wright.
Elsewhere the conversations got pointed. At Warren and Mahoney, a panel on circular design for a changing environment put Rui Peng of Critical alongside voices from Anew, Phoenix Metals and Aurecon. At 159Design, Rachel Smith-Robb moderated Encouraging Bold + Brave Design, a panel that asked how you coax a nervous client past white-on-white. At Lamplight Books, Adam Bryce of Island Magazine led a discussion on graphic design in print. Terrazzo & Stone presented a private screening of Brown vs Brown, described as New Zealand’s first full-length architecture film, with its maker Simon Mark-Brown in the room for questions.
Food and craft carried their share. Cosentino presented an evening with private chef Hercules Noble at UnserHaus, and at Tile Space three designers named Alex, Fulton, McLeod and Walls, talked through the nerve it takes to commit to a permanent design choice. The week closed on a factory floor: Rui Peng walked a group through Critical’s Papatoetoe workshop, where plastic waste becomes Cleanstone.
Two days, three districts
Our centre of gravity was the Design Day circuit, run across two days at the end of the week. Friday 15 March was the Pro Day, built for the trade. Saturday 16 March opened to the public. Both ran from 10am to 4pm across three Design Districts, Grey Lynn, Parnell and Mt Eden, with 18 partner venues opening their showrooms and studios. Ticketholders collected a wristband at one of the district hubs and moved between venues on event transport, scanned in at each stop.
The activations were the point. Forte turned its Grey Lynn showroom into Forest to Finish with Black Bridge Nurseries, bringing trees indoors and setting artists to work on timber panels. Signature Floors handed its floor to the Resene Colour Challenge, with Art Battle painters working live against a limited palette. VidaSpace built Folding Forms with KANAT, a walk-through of veneer, mirror and frame. BoConcept ran an all-senses installation in Mount Eden, from a florist’s biophilic set to a bespoke soundscape and projection in the dimly lit enclosed carpark. Fisher & Paykel staged A Life Lived across its Experience Centre, and 159Design took a theatrical take on ‘bold’. Threaded through the middle was the Design Depot, a biophilia installation at Ponsonby Central built by a collective of makers under the creative direction of Samantha Elliot.
What year one proved
Auckland Design Week has one clear ancestor: AGM’s Urbis Design Day, the showroom circuit that ran roughly 10 times before it ended in 2017. We borrowed that proof of concept and rebuilt it at scale, and the response suggests the appetite has not gone anywhere. Our event partners have told us they met a wave of design professionals who entered the industry in the years since Urbis ceased, people who had never done a circuit like it. The walking tours and the sales-free panels drew the warmest feedback, along with the simple pleasure of discovering a showroom you had walked past for years.
It was, by design, a go big or go home year. Not everything landed, and we are the first to say so, but the first Auckland Design Week did the thing we set out to do. We wanted to give Tāmaki Makaurau a design festival to call its own, and to give our community a reason to gather.
