Close encounters

The crush of the design precinct ZonaTortona was so great, it took 15 minutes to walk the tiny footbridge from the railway tracks to via Tortona the other night. The crush was mighty. The man behind me was squished to me a level of closeness normally associated with three dates and dinner.

Never have I seen such an obsession with design. Last year, it was amazing to see some queues into the public exhibitions during Melbourne Design Week but this took it to a whole new level, with hundreds on the streets drinking (but never drunk) and eating panini (that’s Italian for toasted ham and cheese rolls), dancing and snapping photographs of each other.

There are so many art exhibitions and design galleries, one phone company has launched an application just to let you download the day's events, hence this guy who was having fun posing outside one of the 400-odd events.