Steve Mushin is an industrial designer and visual artist working in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. His illustrations, design projects, exhibitions and workshops explore rewilding cities into habitats for all species.
Steve’s book of ecological inventions, Ultrawild, is published by Allen & Unwin (November 2023), by Rotfuchs (German translation, 2024), and will be released as US, French and Chinese translations/versions in 2025.
Ultrawild has won Best Designed Children's Non-Fiction book (2024 Australian Book Design Awards), and the 2024 Elsie Locke Award For Best Nonfiction (NZ).
Steve has over 20 years experience as an industrial designer, workshop facilitator and science communicator. He has collaborated with scientists, engineers, sculptors and community groups on projects ranging from high-tech urban farms, composting systems and biogas technologies and zero-emission master-plans to science-based adventure playgrounds – amongst many other things.
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 10 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 2012 Steve won the British Council's Big Green Idea Award for an open-source aquaponics system, he managed technology projects at CERES Environment Park for seven years from 2003-2010, and in 2015 was awarded an Australian Design Honours for work in sustainability design education.