Joy + Inspiration = genius
Let’s put the joy back into being creative.
Hey, I’m Krister Gustafsson.
i design immersive playgrounds that spark the creative genius and joy of learning in children.
And when we build them together - everyone gets it!
Magic Garden pioneers significant advances in making immersive playgrounds deliver a purposeful impact in their communities. Each Magic Garden is a Research and Development project incubated within a partnering educational organisation and its community to produce measurable, breakthrough insights about nurturing child-centred creativity and learning. The designs that emerge are then prepared for mass production, manifestos are published and the Design Thinking process is presented as a course.
Consultation is given to support organisations to enjoy co-creating immersive environments with their communities, and to feel confident building immersive technologies in-house, by making it fun and simple to do.
Have a project or questions? I’d love to support.
Collaborations
My design approach is aligned to international child-centred frameworks that spark children’s creative genius and joy of collaborating with their community, who play an active role in the unfoldment of their creative leadership, such as:
International Baccalaureate
Children’s Philosophy
Reggio Emilia
Montessori
Waldorf / Steiner Education
National frameworks including the Australian “Belonging, Being & Becoming “ and “My Time Our Place”
Community includes parents, educational organisations, partners and investors.
How my approach engages children and communities
Magic Garden 1
The Bupa sponsored Magic Garden helped Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum increase visitation by revitalising its children’s exhibits with an immersive playground that inspired families to adopt habits of “Healthy Eating and Healthy Exercise” through the joy of outdoor play activities, in response to rising fatal illnesses in children. The design pioneered pedagogical playgrounds and grew through Word of Mouth to become its flagship exhibition for 6 years.
Magic Garden 2
Incubated in partnership within a G8 Education preschool and co-created with its community, Magic Garden 2 envisioned the future classroom as an immersive and interactive theatre, complete with a Makerspace for children to build it. It sparked children’s creative genius, illuminated their hidden strengths and engaged parents.
Magic Garden 3
Magic Garden 3 is now in development.
It’s an inspired food lab where school children and corporate creative teams will feel the joy of prototyping radically positive futures in a program called, “Bake me a Business”.
Get ready to unleash your creative genius doing Design Thinking using cookie dough! And at the end, you get to eat your design!
Design process
Do you Want to design an immersive environment that’s transformative in your community?
My approach is to support you to have fun with your community envisioning an inspiring future by building it together. You’ll build a simple technology using freely available and familiar materials, so you can get started having a measurable impact right away.
you get to:
Align to your community’s enduring purpose so you can build stronger relationships, think big, and keep producing what matters to all.
Work together in a Co-creative Platform and an Insights Community of your most avid customers & supporters.
Develop simple immersive technologies in-house.
Scale your resources and revenue the more your community are inspired to contribute.
Inspire customer loyalty and Word of Mouth with little effort.
Report measurable, breakthrough impact.
I call it Abundance Design
Because both community impact and resources scale so long as everyone remains inspired to work together.
I do it in 3 simple steps
STEP 1: Vision!
Together, build a prototype that lets you all experience a radically positive future, working scrappy and effortlessly in joy with freely available and familiar materials and technologies. A lot can be learned just by starting to build together and observing people’s shifts in perspective.
STEP 2 Why?
What is that grand, enduring opportunity people keep seeking to advance themselves?
If we haven’t already discovered this opportunity by building the prototype, we document the steps a trailblazer has already taken to experience the transformative impact. Often, they’re an artist, blogger, author or public speaker that’s returned to inspire others around them with their story of transformation and what worked for them.
We then simulate the trailblazer’s most transformative actions as fun activities. Then, we keep the most effective ones. These activities are the features that start to make the immersive environment work - what makes it transformative. Keep activities no-tech to spot the sequence of behaviours that makes the space transformative. Tech can be an unecessary distracting entertainment at this stage.
Then enhance the activities with freely available and familiar technologies to build designs that support people have fun completing these activities.
Measure the impact.
That’s your prototype done and baked, ready to inspire your investors in the community to fund a polished version.
STEP 3: Scale!
We then check if this project appeals beyond your neighbourhood to people globally, using surveys and published interviews with company directors to see if they’re putting their money in the same opportunity.
We make the design modular and customisable so we can find its market fit: the sweet spot in society, where it will gain the most support to grow next. Perhaps that’s as a series of pop-ups across the city, permanent installations or a travelling show!
Want to learn more?
Read the manifesto:
Have a project? I’d love to support!
Hi, I’m an artist
My art is reimprinting the many industries I’ve worked in with a simpler and richer range of creative expression than has been allowed by the suffocating dogmatic systems presiding over them. It’s been allowed to happen at great expense to the psychological and financial wellbeing of both people and businesses. To inspire people out of the fog, and bring joy back to being creative again is my modus of operandi. I felt to do this since my earliest memories as a child and have stuck to it lifelong. I have observed how if I simply live it by example, it gives others permission and space (i.e. it removes the pressure) to live it too, and bring a much richer gamut of who they are to their work, and thus even rediscover hidden talents they didn’t know they had.
If I live it, others will too.
Everything I design, write and teach, supports people to be in their body to settle their nervous system. It settles it so that inspiration can flow. The inspiration for creativity. To be themselves and feel comfortable and founded in who and what they are. As a person and as a community.
My immersive designs create a bubble that give people space to feel joy. Joy is key to impact. I’ve observed its effect since the first puppet theatre I built in my garage as a young boy, that drew the neighbourhood in with their smiles to play in it.
Read the manifesto, “What is an artist, in truth?” to learn more about these trailblazers we call artists; their value to designing immersive environments for impact efficiently.
Career
My extensive experience in designing immersive and interactive playgrounds that are transformative is founded upon 15+ years’ of:
Industrial Design and installing with precision immersive and interactive museum exhibitions.
UX & Service Design of digital transformations. My specialty is combining physical spaces and online experiences into one seamless visitor journey.
Facilitating groups have breakthrough ideas and insights just by sketching and building visionary cool stuff together using the Arts and Crafts, as a Co-design Workshop Facilitator.
Counselling, to build strong stakeholder relationships, establish order and inspire people to enjoy working together. Psychologically, I get what makes immersive environments work. But I do not provide therapeutic counselling.
Facilitating people all ages learn Design Thinking, from preliterate children to adults, as an Educator.
Manifestos
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Manifestos 〰️
What is an artist, in truth?
What makes immersive environments transformative: The precise design features and psychology that make impact effective.
Why simple technology is so transformative.
(Soon to be published.)
“Return to the artist in you, feel the joy.”
Antonietta Bua