'We are going to change the fate of humanity, whether you like it or not' Greta Thunberg

Creative thinking workshops for schools and businesses:

I run high energy, STEM workshops with schools, museums and science centres. I run creative thinking workshops with adults, exploring design thinking techniques, sustainable futures thinking, sketching, design drawing and basic engineering. I help facilitate masterplanning and community consultation processes for urban design and sustainable technology projects.

To make my workshops engaging and fun I use my own real and satirical design projects as starting points. Examples are exploreing how technologies such as autonomous vehicles and decentralised renewable energy could help transform cities for the better. Designing machines to transform cities into high-tech forests. Imagining cities becoming self-sufficient in food production. Or designing human powered flying bike networks.

I help participants brainstorm idea, develop their own sketches, design detailed plans, build simple models and pitch their inventions. My workshops can be as short as one hour (for example a fun keynote, a sketching workshop or a talk in a library), or as involved as multi-day design challenges and conferences.

Examples of my talks and workshops are:

  • City Talks lecture on urban rewilding, with City Gallery Te Whare Toi and Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects (2024)

  • Workshop to inspire students to get into water engineering, at Water New Zealand’s Stormwater Conference (2024)

  • Festival of Ultrawilding – drawing workshop series with Wellington Libraries (2023)

  • CERES park Terra Wonder Community Consultation – working with the community to imagine a new science based adventure playspace (2019)

  • Re-imagining Sydney design workshops with St Johns Park High School in collaboration with STEAMPop (2017/2018)

  • Jurassic Plastic festival in Sydney – Atelier Workshop imagining future bug hotels in collaboration with Arts people. (2017)

  • Spiral Gallery (Tokyo) creative thinking workshops for creative professionals (mostly engineers and designers) to re-imagine Tokyo producing its own food (Farming Tokyo exhibition, 2014).

  • Floating on Steam, Urban re-imagination project with Smart Illumination arts festival and the city council of Dogo, Japan. I ran community brainstorming sessions imagining outrageous sustainable futures for their city (2014)

  • 15 Mile Creek outdoor centre zero-emissions masterplan – I ran community consultation workshops and developed the zero-emissions plan. (2012)

  • Melbourne Museum Biomagination Workshop series – I developed a touring design workshop to help school kids re-imagine their suburbs (2006)

Background in community sustainablity projects:

Much of my experience in running workshops with kids, professionals and the community comes from my work at CERES Environment Park in Melbourne (2003-2011). Here I co-managed technology projects and helped develop the ‘Zero Emissions CERES’ plan. This involved working with community groups to help imagine future energy, water and transportation infrastructure in Melbourne, and working with steering groups of engineers and planners to develop technology demonstration projects.

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What People Are Saying

 

The incursion with Steve Mushin was delightfully surprising. His crazy and out-of- the-box thinking definitely got all of us buzzing with excitement and fresh ideas. We all enjoyed creating and designing inventions that will solve our world’s biggest issues and I know that we will be using his creative thinking in our own real-life situations.

Year 9 Student, Korowa Anglican Girls’ School, June 2016

Stephen’s ‘Biomechanical Machines of Tomorrow workshop at Scienceworks gave kids and adults an opportunity to imagine, dream big, solve the problems of today, and most importantly conceive new and playful approaches to the world we might live in tomorrow. His workshop was extremely fun for all involved, and participants reveled in having ownership of their designs and sharing them with the group. It ignited the creative funny bone in everyone, and offered a new assurance for creative problem solving. We could not have been more pleased about our experience with Stephen and his ingenuity as a workshop facilitator. He was an absolute hoot to work with.

S. Carluccio, Scienceworks 2016

Stephen got the students thinking of the extreme lengths to which we need to go to solve environmental problems. I was able to relate aspects of his design ideas to some real Australian examples (Tasmanian devils, saltwater crocodiles), which made students realise that the ideas were not as far-fetched as they might think.

S. Filan, Abbotsleigh College, April 2015

Stephen engaged all of our girls from the moment they came into the room. His warm and welcoming manner had them on side from the outset. He allowed each of them to share their thoughts and ideas and made them all feel valued and an important part of the workshop. It is not easy to be able to work with a wide age range but Stephen handled it masterfully. The concepts and ideas explored were talked about for days after he left.

J. Lang, Head of Junior School, Korowa Anglican Girls’ School, June 2016