Since its inaugural event in 2022, Fremantle Design Week has expanded in scale and scope. Featuring over 50 design-inspired events, WA’s most innovative, boundary-pushing artists, designers, makers and creators will transform the port city into a creative hub over eight days from 18 – 25 October.

While creative design festivals have a long history in the main city centres of Sydney and Melbourne, they’re few and far between in Australia’s smaller cities. Recognising this gap, and fueled by a passion for creating local opportunities for creativity to thrive, Fremantle Design Week and DesignFreo creative Director Pippa Hurst decided to take matters into her own hands. 

Founded in 2020 by like-minded Fremantle-based designers, makers and doers, including Hurst, DesignFreo’s mission is to strengthen the local design community and promote Fremantle’s abundance of creativity across all disciplines.

Alongside a small, dedicated team, Hurst has curated a program of inspiring, engaging and immersive experiences and events with a local focus and a global outlook. “Our program is thoughtfully curated to engage, provoke, and captivate and feature things that people will find useful and relevant in their own lives,” Hurst says.

Over the course of the week, the expertly curated walkable festival will celebrate design in all its forms. The extensive programme brings together more than 50 design-inspired events including conversations, tours, workshops, films and open studios. 

The narrative thread that pulls these diverse offerings together is the theme of ‘transition’. Not only is WA itself in a transition phase, asserting itself as a serious cultural contender, audiences at the festival will be invited to rethink our world for a healthy, positive future. 

In a WA first, audiences will be invited to explore the radical possibilities of global unity on climate action in the exhibition Planetary Transition by LA-based filmmaker and speculative architect, Liam Young. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, Young’s multi-sensory and provocative films sit in the space between design and fiction.

Youngs’s live storytelling performance Planetary Imaginaries will take audiences on a sci-fi safari through a screen-scape of alternative and hopeful worlds that slip between fiction and documentary, inviting reflection on our own role in the future.

The event hub for Fremantle Design Week can be found at PS Art Space, which will also host Young’s Planetary Transition exhibition as well as a series of conversations with architects, designers and industry leaders. These interactive events aim to inspire curiosity, open up new perspectives and spark imagination among guests and design peers.

“We hope visitors will fall in love with the work of local designers and makers, and some international names they haven’t heard of before; learn something new, and leave feeling energised,” Hurst says.

To find out more about the lineup of exhibitions, discussions and events, head to the Fremantle Design Week website. 

Fremantle Design Week will take over the port city from 18 – 25 October.

Lead image Iwanoff Tomich House. Photography by Jack Lovel