Stephen is a prize-winning Interdisciplinary Designer with an MArch in Design for Performance and Interaction at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He has chair a panel discussion on the topic of heterotopias at ARS Electronica Festival, collaborated on motion graphics projects with Alexander Whitley Dance Company, run short courses in creative coding, Cinema 4D, p5js, Arduino and Unity to university students at UCL and Breitner Academie, and has spent the last few years further broadening his skill set in order to approach all projects with a technologically ‘agnostic’ approach, instead finding the right tools for each new and unique storytelling challenge.
Previously, Stephen spent several years teaching Design, Technology and Engineering at Highgate School in London, where he also introduced a new Pre-U course called Interdisciplinary Design.
He has worked on diverse projects including scenography for a six-hour production of Macbeth set overnight in an East-End tower block, and an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in The Vaults under Waterloo.
He has worked in the architectural field at the Oval Partnership‘s London branch, designing everything from private housing to gardens and landscaping; from interactive benches and installations to brochure and book publications. Exploring the design of architectural space has informed Stephen’s approach to design in focusing on interaction.
He is also an accomplished graphic designer, having designed a wide array of 2D material from logos, letterheads and animations through to entire identities and poster series.
Contact Stephen via e-mail at stephenmahenderson@gmail.com.
Projects
- The Playground2020 will be remembered as a year of great uncertainty and challenges, possible only to overcome through collective and unconventional (inter)action. Physical distancing and the use of flat online communication tools have stripped interaction of ‘messy’, visceral, nuanced, and unpredictable aspects, removing potentials of play and serendipity in finding ways forward. A response to challenges posed by remote interaction, The Playground creates a hybrid world, physical and digital, playful and ser
- Digital Body: Convergent Pulses“Young disabled and non-disabled dancers from Oxford’s Parasol Project have created a new Digital Body film with Alexander Whitley Dance Company. Filmed during the COVID pandemic, their short choreographies, inspired by conversations with scientists from the University of Oxford Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics explore how movement is coordinated within living beings. The real-world movements have been captured and edited together with 3D motion graphics by artists Robin Ashurst, A
- Shakespeare In Shoreditch FestivalGraphic design for a series of ten posters promoting the plays involved in RIFT‘s Shakespeare in Shoreditch festival by illustrating quotations from the plays, and an accompanying poster advertising their outdoor film screening season. The posters were released as part of a viral marketing campaign for #ShakespeareinShoreditch with a poster being released everday at noon for ten days in the lead up to the festival.
- Macbeth Does Murder SleepSet Design, Construction and Dressing of rooms and roof terrace for RIFT theatre’s production of “Macbeth Does Murder Sleep”; a piece of interactive theatre which sees Shakespeare’s Macbeth staged over a period of six hours and allows the audience to sleep overnight in Erno Goldfinger’s iconic brutalist Balfron Tower. Rooms dressed in 1970s Eastern European style, complete with iconographic portraiture; extensive work with fake blood and prop bodies for murder scenes and witches’ apparitions. G
Skills
- Theatre
- Branding
- Corporate Identity
- Print Design
- Typography
- Design
- Sketching
- Set Decorator
- Set Dressers
- Set Construction
- Logo Design
- Illustrator
- Indesign
- Photoshop
- Carpentry
Education
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MArch Design for Performance & InteractionThe Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
- London, United Kingdom
Distinction, The Bartlett Prize, Project Prize, Thesis Prize
BSc Architectural Interdisciplinary Studies
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The interaction between people and space through manual craft, digital production, physical objects and academia.
Awards
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The Bartlett PrizeThe Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Prize for Postgraduate student with highest marks across all modulesT
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Project PrizeThe Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Prize for Postgraduate student with highest awarded design project+ Show more