Michael Castledine

Artist, Designer, Educator

Melbourne

Michael is a CanAussie (Canadian & Australian) artist, designer, and educator.

Formally trained as a Graphic Designer, layered with multimedia training and a Master of Digital Media, his 20-plus years of international experience provides a unique approach to communication and design thinking.

He brings a strong critical thinking and life-centered approach to XR (Extended Reality) storytelling, brand identity/management, typography, spatial design, web development, UI/UX mobile, and product design. Working with municipalities, studios, corporate, and learning environments, he has established great collaborative partnerships and projects with clients such as Woods Bagot Architects, Canadian Olympic Committee, NBA (National Basketball Association), and Keith Jones and Good Company.

His continuing art and practice-based research project: Extending the Human Umwelt: Reframing Our Understanding of an Environment via Mixed Reality and Digital Soundscapes / Visualizations, explores how a multisensory and gamified storytelling approach can create strong crossovers from one sense to inform another via shared, participatory experiences.

As an educator, his goal is to encourage collaboration, particularly the cross-pollination of ideas and communication, where collaborators are simultaneously teachers and learners, to then apply these new learnings in unfamiliar situations. His approach supports conversations in the classroom that provoke how artists and designers can challenge affordances through ideation and evolution of the craft. These methodologies start with an understanding of intuition and self-awareness to evolve towards collaborative critical thinking.