Steve Mushin’s Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan to Rewild Every City on Earth has just won the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction at the 2024 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. He tells us why we should encourage kids to have ludicrous ideas and shares his tips for helping them build their creative muscle.
My name is Steve Mushin. I’m a designer and an inventor. But I’ve also spent decades teaching creative thinking. I help kids and adults think outside the square to imagine awesome future cities.
My book Ultrawild is a collection of inventions to rewild every city on earth. To transform Wellington, Auckland, Sydney, Tokyo and Beijing into incredible high-tech jungles. It’s a design and science comedy. But it’s also full of real design techniques that can help us build our creative brains.
To make leaps of innovation, we must have fun with ideas. We need to be silly. We need to allow our brains to explore the stupidest and most joyful ideas we can possibly think of. I call the ridiculous ideas in Ultrawild ‘design thought experiments’. To show readers that no idea is too stupid for serious contemplation, I design compost-cannon-toilets, flying bicycles, and fake-tree 3D printing robot birds.
Creative muscle-building
In Ultrawild I go to outrageous lengths to think through the maths and science of my wild ideas. I do this to demonstrate engineering thinking. I do this to show that wild-sounding ideas to transform our world are often more possible than most people think. But here’s why thinking through crazy-sounding ideas is so important for our brains. Brain science tells us that creativity is a bit like a muscle, just like a bicep. And just like a bicep, your creative brain needs exercise. Just like how when we don’t exercise our arms, we become weaker, when we don’t exercise our creative brains, we become less creative. In her book entitled ‘Your Creative Brain’, Harvard University psychologist Dr Shelley Carson says it like this:
“By forming mental images of highly unlikely scenarios, you are training your brain to think outside the proverbial box.”
In other words, being wildly imaginative is great exercise for boosting our brains’ abilities to find creative solutions to complex problems. Or as I say in Ultrawild, ‘ludicrous ideas are bootcamp for brains’.
The only problem is: cities and jobs and busy lives and packed school curriculums often don’t help us keep our creative brains strong. In fact, NASA did a study and found that the average person is most creative at age 4 or 5, and that it’s all downhill from there.
But, here’s the good news: just like how we can all get stronger with a bit of exercise, we can all strengthen our creative brains – no matter what we age we are. By dreaming, by drawing, by writing, by making, by digging, by planting, by inventing. By having fun redesigning our schools, our homes, our offices, our streets, our gardens and our bedrooms. By rewilding our creative brains. By ultrawilding every city on earth.
Here are five ways to help your child build their creative muscle:
1: Let them lose with pens and paper and ask them to go wild drawing and designing their perfect city.
2: Save those empty cereal boxes, interesting jars and toilet paper rolls from the recycling and challenge your kids to invent a new machine with them.
3: Think of a problem in your home that needs solving. What creative ideas do your children have to fix it?
4: Send them outside and task them with creating a special space in the garden to attract bees or butterflies or birds.
5: Ask them to brainstorm a list of things your family can do at a household level to help the planet.
Steve Mushin is the author of Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan to Rewild Every City On Earth, published by Allen & Unwin. www.ultrawild.org
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