Steve Cober

Background

About Steve Cober

Steve Cober is a multidisciplinary designer and entrepreneur focusing on creative innovation, cultural entrepreneurship, and future-forward educational practices. Steve's portfolio encompasses product, environmental, and interactive entertainment design, including collaborations with industry giants such as Kellogg's, Visa, Nintendo, Hasbro, eOne, and Disney. As a co-founder of Magic Pony, Steve transformed the traditional boundaries of art and business by seamlessly merging retail, exhibition, and design elements. Over a decade, Magic Pony served as a vibrant cultural nexus, collaborating with artists, designers, corporations, and cultural institutions to produce groundbreaking exhibitions, events, and art books. Notably, Steve played a pivotal role in curating "This Is Not a Toy," a retrospective exhibition of designer toy culture featuring luminaries like KAWS and Takashi Murakami, co-curated by Pharrell Williams. In his most recent role as Creative Director at Secret Location, Steve spearheaded "Waking Wonderland," an immersive themed entertainment experience expanding the imaginative universe of Lewis Carroll. Working closely with the production team, his responsibilities included developing storyworld narrative, concept art, audience interaction design and crafting the project’s overall branding & communication strategy. Beyond his creative endeavours, Steve’s academic research explores emergent narrative, participatory art, and innovations in digital-physical technologies. His Master's research project,"Fiction is Reality: Designing Liminal Spaces for Global Fandom," yielded an IoT-enabled playable prototype for theme parks that offered groundbreaking interaction possibilities adaptable to any IP, environment, or audience. An avid educator, Steve shares his wealth of knowledge through lectures on creative entrepreneurship, illustration, and interaction design. He employs prototyping and ideation as catalysts for learning and collaboration. He has conducted design thinking and lean methodology workshops for OCADU's Imagination Catalyst and The Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers. Steve has also led Humber College's Transmedia Fellowship, a cross-disciplinary program emphasizing applied research through experimentation and rigorous prototyping. He implemented strategic integration of VR and AR technologies into pedagogy across creative disciplines at Humber College. In addition, he provides mentorship and supervision for graduate research projects at Toronto Metropolitan University.