Design Tasmania was founded in 1976 in Launceston by Gary Ogle Cleveland AM and Pat Cleveland, and was envisaged as the heart-centre of design for Tasmania.

A not-for-profit design organisation, Design Tasmania is dedicated to nurturing and championing creative practice in Tasmania, encouraging creative risk-taking, facilitating new work, and collaborating to broaden the national and international audience for Tasmanian design and craft. Design Tasmania also houses the Design Tasmania Wood Collection, an evolving collection of contemporary Tasmanian wood design that highlights Tasmania’s unique position in the global design industry.

Additionally, Design Tasmania stages exhibitions; facilitates mentoring; and runs colloquiums, camps and workshops. The Design Tasmania Store presents a curated retail collection from Australian practitioners, with a core focus on Tasmanian designers and makers.

Design Tasmania’s presentation for the Melbourne Design Fair has been developed by Tasmanian-based freelance designer and curator Michelle Boyde and includes works by Jane Bamford,  Laura McCusker, Brodie Neill, Scott Van Tuil, Lillian Wheatley and Belinda Winkler.

‘Our designers have a rhttp://www.scottvantuil.com/everence that comes with knowing how slowly their materials grow or form. They live, or have lived in Tasmania, where creative people are inextricably linked with the natural world. In considering Melbourne Design Week’s 2022 theme of ‘making good’, there’s a sense that these designers see the local materials they work with as innately good before they are taken into their hands to be transformed. People who buy their work become custodians of this ‘goodness’ – inviting the work to be part of their spaces and lives, respecting its form and function, hopefully entering into a contract to give them long lives.’

– Michelle Boyde, Curator