Geelong Design Week 2026 Opens 1 October With a New Regional Design Fair
A regional city's design festival returns this spring, with a new fair at its recently opened convention centre leading the program.
The festival covers exhibitions, workshops, talks and tours across the city and the wider region. A separate fair brings designers and studios together in a single building.
Image: Geelong waterfront, by Dtfman via Wikimedia Commons, CC0, public domain dedication.
When it runs and what is on
Geelong Design Week 2026 runs from 1 to 11 October, with more than 100 exhibitions, workshops, talks, tours, performances and public events across the region.
The program covers the city and its surrounds, so visitors can plan a day around a single venue or move between several. Venues range from the convention centre precinct to museums and university facilities.
Three parts of the program are free. They are the fair itself, the Friday night session at the fair, and the closing community runway and block party.
The new regional design fair
The flagship event is the inaugural Victorian Regional Design Fair, at the newly opened Nyaal Banyul Geelong Convention and Event Centre. It runs from 1 to 4 October.
The fair brings together more than 50 designers, studios and creative businesses from Greater Geelong and regional Victoria. Their work spans furniture, fashion, ceramics, landscape design, advanced manufacturing and emerging technologies.
That mix is deliberate. It puts studio makers and advanced manufacturers in the same room, which is where collaborations between craft and industry tend to start.
A pop-up shop will carry more than 100 locally designed and manufactured products. Fourteen talks across three days will cover subjects from ethical colour and circular fashion to First Nations co-design.
A timeline traces more than 60,000 years of design and innovation in Djilang, the Wadawurrung name for the Geelong region. Placing that timeline inside a contemporary design fair connects the region's long making history with the work being shown now.
The fair is free to attend. A Friday Night at the Fair session runs 6.30pm to 8.30pm on Friday 2 October, also free, with live performances including an eco-futurist work by artist Laura Alice and musician Quinn EarthChild, and a DJ set from Kanji K.
Across the wider program
Comedian and design enthusiast Tim Ross presents What A Ripper!, a live celebration of Australian design icons.
The National Wool Museum hosts On the Move, an interactive family exhibition created with illustrator James Gulliver Hancock. The museum sits in the city's wool store heritage, so the exhibition connects to the building it occupies.
Platform Arts stages Extra Lives, combining a live band, comedy and gaming controlled by audience votes. That format hands the audience control of what happens on stage, so each performance runs differently.
Deakin University opens its ARC Research Hub for Future Fibres for talks and tours on textile circularity and sustainable materials. Circularity is the term for keeping materials in use rather than discarding them, and it is one of the fair's recurring themes.
How the festival closes
The program finishes on 11 October with a free community runway and block party celebrating the city's independent fashion scene.
The Geelong Design Market runs alongside it at the Mills building in Newtown. The market gives local makers a retail outlet at the end of the festival, after the exhibition side has finished.
Bringing the runway and the market together on the same day concentrates the public program into a single closing weekend.
Why Geelong hosts it
Geelong is Australia's only UNESCO City of Design. The UNESCO Creative Cities Network recognises cities that use creativity as a driver of sustainable urban development, and the City of Design designation is the strand for design-led cities.
City of Greater Geelong chief executive Ali Wastie said the fair would connect regional designers with industry and new audiences.
The designation is the reason the regional fair sits in Geelong rather than another Victorian city. The wider program reflects it, with venues across the municipality taking part.
What the last festival drew
The previous Geelong Design Week in 2024 attracted more than 40,000 people across more than 85 events.
That gives a baseline for this year's edition. With more than 100 events listed for 2026, the program has grown, and the addition of a four-day fair at a new venue gives the festival a single physical centre it previously lacked.
The full program and any ticketing details are published on the Geelong Design Week site, with the Surf Coast Times report carrying the announcement of the new fair.
Planning a visit
Free entry applies to the fair, the Friday night session at the fair, and the closing runway and block party. Visitors can build a full day around the convention centre precinct and walk between venues.
The talks program rewards planning, because sessions run across three days and some will fill. Checking the program before travelling helps.
The closing weekend carries both the runway and the design market, so anyone wanting the festival's biggest public moments should aim for 10 and 11 October.
For visitors coming from Melbourne, the trip to Geelong is a day return by train. The convention centre sits close to the waterfront, which is where the city's own design story is most visible.
Geelong's growing events calendar
The city has expanded its event offering in recent years. Geelong's growing events calendar now includes a running festival alongside the design program, giving visitors more than one reason to time a trip around a weekend.
That spread matters for local businesses. A program running across eleven days puts visitors into the city centre across two weekends rather than concentrating them into one.
The City of Greater Geelong hosts both events, and the design week spreads across venues in the municipality and the wider region.
What to take from it
The fair, the Friday night session and the closing runway and block party are free to attend, and the program runs across venues in the city centre.
Readers can explore other parts of the state through the Victoria local guide.
Works Cited
Geelong Design Week. "Geelong Design Week 2026." Geelong Design Week, n.d., https://www.geelongdesignweek.com.au/.
Surf Coast Times. "New Regional Design Fair Leads Packed Geelong Design Week Program." Surf Coast Times, n.d., https://timesnewsgroup.com.au/surfcoasttimes/news/new-regional-design-fair-leads-packed-geelong-design-week-program/.
Dtfman. "Geelong Waterfront." Wikimedia Commons, n.d., https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geelong_Waterfront.jpg.