Design is changing — and so are we. You’re invited to take a rare behind-the-scenes look at how our built environment gets made.
MSDx: In the Making is about the process as much as the product. It celebrates exploration, ideation and collaboration, revealing the raw, risky and real work of design. In a time of rapid change and generative AI, showing how ideas evolve is more valuable than ever.
The Glyn Davis Building will transform into a creative laboratory. You’ll encounter a vivid exhibition of student projects that are conceptual, experimental, sometimes messy — but always meaningful.
Alongside hundreds of works in progress, MSDx: In the Making will launch Thesis. Presenting forward-thinking solutions and theoretical deep dives, Thesis is a captivating showcase from our PhD and mid-year graduating masters students.
Discover a new generation of designers, architects, planners and builders whose work expands our understanding of the places we live in, and the forces that influence it.
This is design in motion. And the future is taking shape.
Opening night
Celebrate the launch of MSDx Winter with us. From the Atrium to the rooftop, our students will transform every floor of the Glyn Davis Building into a vibrant creative laboratory. Be the first to experience the new exhibition while enjoying workshops, talks, food trucks, drinks and beats from our in-house DJ.
Welcome to Country
5:45pm - Elisabeth Murdoch Forecourt
Featured content
Work in progress
A message from the Director of Melbourne School of Design
At MSD, we are increasingly placing emphasis on revealing the people, ideas, and values embodied in the work; the material, cultural and political systems behind buildings and places; the before-and-after flickering either side of the image, whether in the seminar discussion, sketchbook, or code fragments that produce it; the living places and materials that ‘things’ emerge from.
However, exhibitions can often be mere assemblages of static images, inert surfaces rather than living substance. While design brings form to ideas, this pretence of completion does not represent what design is about. It valorises merely what something looks like rather than how it works, how it might happen, or why it might exist. But at their best, MSD’s learning environments are messy, inclusive and collaborative, exemplifying how things are made in practice, as well as how knowledge is continually reconstructed.
Indeed, design’s task, whether we like it or not, involves creating settings for us to encounter societal ideas. Such ideas are woven through the seams of design practice as well as its products, consciously or otherwise. So this edition of MSDx offers a behind-the-scenes view of design learning in progress, in which our students are practicing how to design with care, rigour and purpose — asking not only what we build, but how and why, and for whom. Design is work-in-progress because people and places are work-in-progress. So ‘showing our workings’ is something we celebrate.
Professor Dan Hill
Director, Melbourne School of Design
A glimpse into a new collective future
A message from the Director, Bachelor of Design
Once again, the winter edition of MSDx will have a strong focus on the processes behind designing. Like MSDx Winter 2025, rather than focus on final design outputs, this exhibition showcases the trials, explorations, and techniques for generating design ideas and the methods for resolving them. This time we also share the diverse places where designing and teaching takes place - the sites students have camped in, walked through, mapped and modelled, physically and virtually - and the places where we teach - studios, the streets, galleries, museums, and offices.
We hope you enjoy this insight into the creative worlds of our amazing students and their visions for the constructed environments of the future.
Professor Janet McGaw
Interim Deputy Dean and Director, Bachelor of Design
Are you from industry?
MSDx is a great opportunity to discover emerging talent. We invite you to come and explore the innovative projects being produced by our graduate students.
If you're from the fields of architecture, building, urban planning, or construction, we'd love you to join us on opening night. Your participation will not only highlight our students' talents, but also strengthen the bonds between academia and industry.
Are you from a secondary school?
Are your students dreaming of becoming an architect, urban planner, builder or designer? MSDx is a great way to get an up-close look at what studying at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning is like.
Schools and students are very welcome to visit for self-guided tours. The exhibition has clear signage throughout to help tell the story and support independent exploration.
