Auckland Design Week 2024 opens the door to design innovation and inspiration.

Discover the creative and collaborative design excellence of Tāmaki Makaurau.

Design is integral to our lives. It informs our sense of time and place and shapes how we interact with the world around us. It creates a unique and proud sense of identity. Design spans countries and centuries, capturing and reflecting our cultures back at us.

Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland is home to world-class innovators and makers. A community who bridge artistic disciplines from architecture and spatial design, to interiors and product creation, textiles and fashion. So to connect people from these groups to kōrero, share and collaborate is a special event for the city.

Jen Jones is the founder and director of Auckland Design Week, a new annual celebration. She and her team have created a programme which will excite and inspire the design community, the curious, absolute beginners and the lovers of beautiful and functional shape, colour and form.

Jen, who has a background in developing and managing high-end residential and commercial design projects, says she wanted to create a considered event, not only for design professionals, but for all.

“This event will be a window into our culture, to our work and an open and inclusive invitation to come and celebrate the great design produced by our city’s designers, makers and facilitators. Every other major city has a design week or festival – it’s time we had our own!” she says.

Auckland Design Week 2024 will be a creative conversation around the curatorial theme of ‘Bold & Brave’, ushering in a mood of vitality and optimism.

“The most obvious interpretation is we are bidding farewell to the white-one-white aesthetic and encouraging vibrant expression through daring choices in colour, shape and materiality,” says Jen.

“We’re calling on designers to challenge the status quo of how we design and to prioritise the use of recyclable and sustainable materials that showcase innovation and positive environmental impact.”

The event has attracted some of the best names in the business including the event’s presenting partner Resene, industry partners Forté Flooring and Cosentino, as well as 15 of Auckland’s design showrooms, two studio pop-ups, and over 50 brands, designers, makers and suppliers across a range of design disciplines.

Nick Riley, director of leading strategic brand and design consultancy, Nonfiction has been working alongside Jen on the look and feel of the event and he is eager to put a spotlight on our creative talent. “It’s easy to underestimate the amount of pure creative talent that we possess and the scale of its cultural and commercial impact on both Tāmaki Makaurau and Aotearoa,” he says.

Stepping outside the parameters of the traditional fair model, Auckland Design Week 2024 features a Design Day – a tour of three Tāmaki Makaurau Design Districts.

Leading retailers and design studios in Grey Lynn, Parnell and Mt Eden/Uptown will be opening their doors and welcoming ticketholders, with each district showcasing work that reflects the unique style and tone of the artists, creators and retailers involved. A highlight of the design week calendar, it’s an unmissable (and walkable!) immersive experience for participants.

Ponsonby will host a Design Depot which will serve as the event’s central design hub. It will orbit around a biophilia-inspired theme, championing sustainability, ethics and products and ideas inspired by the natural world. The Design Depot will be a place for designers, retailers and brands who work outside of the Design Districts to exhibit their best pieces and ideas.

The Auckland Design Week 2024 programme is diverse and replete with talks, panels and tours which aim to initiate creative conversation and ideas exchange. Events include fashion, design and architecture panels, an evening with Hercules Noble at Unserhaus, as well as a screening of Simon Mark-Brown’s feature-length film, Brown vs Brown, which showcases the tensions around mid-century era architecture, which his late father, Peter Mark-Brown was central to from the 1950s to the 1970s.

A group of the city’s top designers will kōrero about their own design journeys including Rachel Smith-Robb, lead tutor on Interior Design for Residential Contexts at the Nanette Cameron School of Interior Design, interior designer Janice Kumar-Ward, architect Lisa Day and artist Grace Wright. This is a must-see event for anyone wanting to build confidence and work outside of their design comfort zone.

The week also provides an opportunity to learn more about the design aesthetic of the award-winning spaces such as Hotel Britomart, Wynyard Quarter’s Tank Park, retail space Faradays and wellness centre, Studio Red. Ticketholders can tour these locations with the architects and designers responsible for bringing them to life, including Cheshire Architects’ DJ Tai, George Gregory and Emily Priest, as well as LandLab’s Ethan Reid.

With sustainability front of mind, Unispace and Arup will host a talk on Aotearoa’s first regenerative workspace, and renowned furniture and lighting designer Tim Webber will be leading a talk on how Aotearoa’s designers compete with international brands.

That’s just a taste of what Auckland Design Week 2024 has in store – there are many more speaker and social events, and professional and public design days to round off what will be a rich, rewarding and important event for the future of Tāmaki Makaurau.

Auckland Design Week runs from March 10 to 16. Tickets are $150 and cover all events. Tickets are limited. For more information on the event programme and to secure your tickets visit aucklanddesignweek.com.