Steve Mushin

MUSHIN, Steve (1978 - ) is an industrial designer and visual artist from Aotearoa New Zealand and currently working in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He holds a Bachelor of Industrial Design from RMIT in Melbourne. His illustrations, design projects, exhibitions and design workshops explore interactions between human made machines and natural ecologies.

Steve has over 20 years’ experience as an industrial designer, design workshop facilitator, and science communicator. He has collaborated with scientists, engineers, farmers, steel fabricators and landscapers on high tech urban agriculture, composting and biogas technologies, zero-emission master-plans, science communication and science-based adventure playgrounds, amongst many other things.

In 2012 Steve won the British Council's Big Green Idea Award for an open-source aquaponics system. Steve’s satirical future inventions were exhibited by The Australian Design Centre as part of CUSP (2013), a touring exhibition of futures design thinking.

In August 2014, his exhibition Now If What Then: Farming Tokyo was exhibited as a solo show at Spiral contemporary art gallery in Japan, in collaboration with the Tokyo University of Agriculture. This exhibition presented ten of Steve's projects which re-imagined the world’s largest city as self-sufficient in food production. His designs have also been exhibited in Sydney at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery (2015), at The Glasshouse in Port Macquarie (2016), and at MRPG gallery and Docklands Library Gallery in Melbourne (2017).

In 2015, Steve was awarded an Australian Design Honours for work in sustainability design education.

Steve’s first book of ecological inventions, Ultrawild, was published by Allen & Unwin (November 2023). It was described as “the most astonishing children's book I have read in ages” by Paula Green (Poetry Box) and “mind blowing” by Claire Mabey (The Spinoff), and was generally lauded for its inventive spirit and originality.

Steve is available for Writers in Schools visits and runs high energy creative-thinking and STEM workshops in schools. These cover design sketching, 3D drawing, modelmaking, and pitching big ideas to transform and rewild the world.