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Bruce Mau is a designer, a revolutionary, and a visionary. During the last 15 years he and his studio have worked collaboratively with well known clients, designers and leaders in the creation of projects that shape our future and redefine our world and our way of living. His work involves constant search and experimentation; broad, collective and interdisciplinary.

In this interview, Mau discusses how we live and the structures we have created to support our life styles. He reminds us that “design is invisible until it fails” and calls for rethinking the role of design in creating the good life and in shaping a better future. He discusses the underlying and unavoidable links between design and economies that must support and sustain nine billion souls.

CATALYST: Thank you for meeting with us Bruce. We would like to invite you to explore the good life with us and the role of design in shaping it.
What comes to mind when you think of “the good life”?
BRUCE: That’s a great question. I think that you have to imagine a new definition of good, because one way of defining that is really part of the old way of thinking, is a kind of excess of luxury, or consumption. We need a more intelligent way of being in the world.
We need to think about using less energy not more, consuming less not more. It is not about having a worse time or having less of an experience, but rather about having more of an experience and less of an impact.

CATALYST: What role does lifestyle play in this more intelligent way of being in the world?
BRUCE: Well it is important to note that it is actually two words, “life” and “style”, and not the singular, one word term that is again generally considered to be about consumption. If you think about style, there are some people who think style is not a serious subject, not something that is worthy of serious consideration. But in fact, philosophy is style. Style is a way of living, a way of being. So, when I put together my book Life Style I was really trying to understand, “What is our way of living? What is our way of being?” In other words, “What is our style of life?”
In trying to understand life style in a new context, I realized that what is going on is extraordinary. We have an amazing capacity to realize our own potential–just absolutely off the charts. Throughout history who had the capacity that we have as individual citizens today? For most of history, almost everything that we are capable of was out of the reach of even the most powerful rulers.
But now, we have capacities that kings and queens and leaders could have not even imagined. That requires a new conversation about those possibilities and the philosophical issues, questions and dimensions that they challenge us with, and introduce us to.

CATALYST: Do we also need a new conversation about the relationship between style and design?
BRUCE: Well, I think style can also be positive or negative; you can have a “hideous style”, not only visually, but also in its conception.
To produce a deliberate style that is not accidental, that isn’t a consequence of random effects, there is only one way to do that, and that is by design. It is a process of understanding that I want a particular outcome, not random outcomes, and therefore I intend to design it.

CATALYST: We are also really interested in how you tie design with economies, and other concepts you discussed in your books. So, if you say that the future demands a new kind of designer, what qualities, tools and skills does this new designer need?
BRUCE: That’s a great question. If you think about design in this new realm, if you think about designing a new way of being, designing a way of living, it’s not necessarily a visual outcome. It’s not necessarily an object-based outcome.
It’s really about thinking about the often-invisible systems that are supporting our way of living. It’s thinking about the context in which we are living, as an ecology that sustains process.
So you need a very different sensibility. First of all, you need the tools to understand systems. You need the tools to understand different scales of operation, that if you’re designing an object, that object is not a discrete entity. That object is actually incorporated in other systems, and the object itself incorporates systems within it.
So the idea that somehow you could have a thing that is separate and discrete from the context in which it exists in is a kind of fiction that we have produced in order to get our work done.
The reality is that the objects that we produce are tied into complex webs of relationships, with the ecology and the context that they are part of, which will demand a different set of abilities, tools, ways of thinking, and the ability to move across scales, being able to look at the big picture. Zooming out and looking at the big picture of the economy and ecology of a project, zooming in and looking at almost an atomic level to understand the matter and the energy of a project. And then, being able to communicate at those different scales, what’s going on and how we put things together.
Obviously that is a very different approach and I have to say that it has been really challenging over the last several years. For me, I have more or less worked this way, organically, from the outset, with a kind of sensibility and proclivity that I have to think about those kinds of things. But I have to say that it’s been a real challenge in the market. Most people don’t see design that way, and most companies don’t see design as something that you apply to the business, not to the products. They see it in a very particular way, in a very conventional way. I’ve been fortunate to find people along the way, who really wanted to engage in this other level. But it’s been quite challenging to articulate it even, to say, “This is how I see it, and this is how I want to work”. It’s very different from the conventional way.

CATALYST: That being said, we also want to ask you, in your Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, you said that “everyone is a leader”, and in Massive Change and also in The Third Teacher, you said that “everyone is a designer”. For you, what is the relationship between designing and leading?
BRUCE: In some ways, designing is leading; design is leadership. You can’t design, except to envision a new world. I don’t think there is a better definition of leadership. For me one of the most interesting developments in this way of thinking about design is that the leadership of governments becomes a design project. The leadership of business, of organizations, within your own life, these become design questions. If you want specific outcomes, that is design. If you want something other than random events in your life, you are in some way designing that.
The idea that everyone can be a leader is really about understanding that leadership isn’t something that you earn by tenure; it’s not something that you have because you’ve been here the longest. We should be open to leadership across the spectrum of experience. I’ve had this experience myself, I did a huge project in Japan, and the youngest guy in the studio led that project. He went to Japan and met with one of the most powerful developers in the world, in Tokyo; here’s a young guy, just out of college, leading a project, collaborating with one of the most powerful people in Japan, and it was amazing. He just had what it took at that moment to lead that project.
The idea that somehow the hierarchical, chronological orders to leadership is not the new spirit.

CATALYST: Just to add to what you were speaking about previously, you are one of the few leaders who is advocating so much optimism. What do you see is the relationship between optimism, politics and design?
BRUCE: Another really good question. One of the challenges about being optimistic is that you look like the village idiot. People are so often battered by constant barrage of negative images, negative stories, and the worst of human behavior, that it’s no wonder that people are pessimistic. One of the ways I’ve described this is, if you published a newspaper called reality, it would be a mile thick, and the first quarter inch of it would be the New York Times, and it would scare the living daylights out of you. You would just want to hunker down, lock your doors, close the borders, and be defensive in every way. But the rest of the mile is massive change. The rest of the newspaper that is a mile thick would be things like, “here are people at Northwestern University who are collaborating to invent an AIDS test that costs less than a dollar and gives you the results in under an hour”. You’re not going to hear that story because no one’s going to get hurt by it, no one’s going to get killed by it, you’re not going to hear that story.
I think one the great challenges of our time is to actually see the reality of what’s going on. The reality is that we’re almost seven billion people. If we were failing, we would be one billion. The fact is that most of the challenges that we face today are the challenges of success, not failure.
The great problems that we will face in this century are the problems of succeeding. That we are going to be seven, eight, nine, ten billion people, and that we are going to face the challenge of feeding them, sheltering them, connecting them, allowing them to reach their full potential.
When I think about my own optimism, it’s a fact-based optimism. If we were a billion people, I’d be pessimistic, and rightfully so. But the reality is that it’s probably the greatest moment in human history, to be alive and working, where more people in more places are participating in new forms of wealth and possibility than at any time in human history. By a radical long shot not by a margin. Billions of people have become wealthy; now that is causing new problems, but that is a wonderful problem to have. And we still have great old problems, like the people at the very bottom of the pyramid, in poverty and needing access to possibility.

CATALYST: Some of the challenges that you described in Massive Change are about those seven billion people, so you referred to them as citizens. You also have discussed the need for designers to design from the perspective of the citizen. That would include both sets of people. How do you think designers can be enabled to do this?
BRUCE: Well, when I was quite young I thought of myself as putting out a signal. That I needed to broadcast a signal that other people could find. There are many people who see people as citizens and not consumers; unfortunately they are not the majority at this moment in history. I could tell you the number of times when I’ve been in a room and people have referred to the population as citizens and not consumers; almost every company thinks of people as consumers. To change that, you need to actually think about this way of working and thinking for yourself, and think, “What am I doing to understand the individual and their possibility as a citizen? And then I need to broadcast that signal in a clear and pure way, so that other people can find me, because I need to find the other people who also want to work this way.
When I was young and started out first working in design, I realized that the kind of interests that I had were really esoteric and not too many people would be right for me to work with. It was really critical to maintain clarity of signal so that they could find me, because if I were doing something that confused or compromised that signal, they would not be able to find me.
I think a really important aspect of a design practice and being a designer, is to understand that you have to actually take responsibility for that signal.

CATALYST: Do you think the future of design lies in redesigning economies?
BRUCE: I certainly think that’s a huge issue, and challenge that we face. So, if you think about the way that we do things as an economy, in other words, if we’re making things and exchanging things, that’s an economy. The way that we’ve designed the economy determines what gets exchanged, and what has value. In business there’s an idea that whatever you measure is what you value. If you want people to do certain things, then you have to measure that thing in order that they know that that’s what you’re actually interested in. We’re working with a group right now, and they have time sheets. And we said, well, “Why don’t you have idea sheets?” If you believe in ideas, why would you have time sheets and not idea sheets? Are you really saying that it’s all about labor by the hour? Or do you believe in the value of ideas? If you do, then you need to redesign that economy, and begin to understand how do we actually quantify it, measure it and therefore value it, and communicate that value and build a new economy around that new value.

CATALYST: In your book Life Style, you talk about the Global Image Economy. I wonder if you could please elaborate on the meaning of that.
BRUCE: What we realized was that there was a new kind of context. If you think about the image as a practice, there’s a wonderful book that Phaidon produced called 30,000 Years of Art. They just selected some of the most beautiful images and artifacts from around the world, in all different cultures over 30,000 years, and put them in chronological order. So you can see, what’s happening in Japan, at the same time as something else that is happening in Central America. And, what you see that’s really interesting is that, for most of history, images were actually objects.
There’s a huge transition that happens sometime over the last thousand years or so, and accelerated in the Renaissance, where you move from the object to the image. But there’s no capacity to reproduce that image. So each image is a unique entity, and over time we developed the capacity to do absolutely amazing images at increasing scale, and to create these extraordinary images of exceptional power. The development of image distribution begins with Gutenberg, and earlier in China, where we introduced the first notion of reproduction. What happened over the last century, especially over the last fifty years is that the capacity to reproduce runs like wildfire. What I realized is that this is actually in the process of generating a new context within which we work.
If you think about who owns the power of the image, for most of the last five centuries, it was the church. So almost all the images in the 30,000 years of art over the last five centuries are images from the religious works of one sort or another. And they controlled the image, and if you wanted to experience one, that’s where you went, they saw the power of it. Now it’s a radically democratized potential. My daughters do videos like I did drawings with pencils. They have the capacity to use the image and generate new expressions in a way that, when I was a child, would have involved a Hollywood studio. I call it “cinematic migration,” and that distribution of the economy of the image is producing all sorts of new behaviors, economies, possibilities, and so on.

CATALYST: What role does the Global Image Economy play in the relationship between business and design?
BRUCE: If you think about producing a product today, if you have a business, you have an image business and a design business, or you probably won’t have a business for long.
Every business today is a design business, or it won’t be a business in the future. It’s about designing new possibilities, and the capacity to visualize those potentials is central to future business.
And that puts design and visualization and the image economy right at the heart of new business. So, if you think about the proliferation of images, and the competition of images for attention, you realize that it’s unbounded in its voluptuousness, in its capacity to produce new and beautiful things, and sometimes also horrific things.
But the capacity to generate visual culture grows daily, and that means that the competitive context in which you’re working is that new image context, that new image economy. Ultimately, if we’re producing 100 billion images a year, and if you’re creating a new thing, if you’re producing a new image of a new way of living, a new idea or product, that means there’s going to be 100 billion and one. And that ‘one’ has to survive in that context of 100 billion.

CATALYST: Also in your work you spoke about the importance of a collaborative process, in particular the use of renaissance teams and the redefining of the relationship between the designer and client. Why is this so critical for you?
BRUCE: Design is still very much thought of as a singular cultural practice, in other words it’s about authorship; it’s about a single individual doing a single thing. So, the whole world of wonderful products and beautiful objects ties us back to that understanding.
The reality of most great challenges that we face today is that the likelihood that an individual can develop the capacity to solve it is almost zero.
The likelihood that a person has the renaissance ability to master multiple bodies of knowledge is really not plausible. If we’re going to take on these challenges, what that suggests is that we have to develop new models for how we do that; that if we simply go at it in the old way, “I’m smarter than the last guy”, then it’s going to be a setup for failure.
One of the things that we discovered in our own practice, it was actually Bill Buxton who is a lead researcher for Microsoft who saw it, he said what you’re actually doing is putting together a renaissance team, because the renaissance person is no longer possible. Ultimately, if you’re going to take on these challenges, you’re going to have to assemble a team that has science, art, design, culture, imaging, cinema, writing, poetry; ultimately you are going to want to assemble a team that has a great diversity of talent and skill to be able to tackle the problem, articulate the problem, speculate on solutions, analyze solutions, and really formulate new strategies. That was where that concept came from, but we had already developed this organically in our own practice; you’ve got to put together a group of people if you’re going to have any hope of dealing with these issues.

CATALYST: Some of the challenges you mentioned, and identified in Massive Change. You also identified several Design Economies, as you refer to them. We were curious as to how those Design Economies relate to the Global Image Economy that you outlined in Life Style?
BRUCE: The notion of a discrete economy is not really plausible. In other words, we identified ten design economies – energy, movement, the economy of the image, the market economy – and the way that we defined those is as realms of your experience or of your world that are being reinvented or invented by these new capacities to design.
If you imagine the number of times that you can close your eyes, and open them in a space where you only see natural things, you realize that it’s almost zero. You live inside of a complex set of design economies, and most of your experience is designed. You live a designed life.
Now much of that is really badly designed, but it is designed nonetheless. It is produced for you. Much of it is also extraordinarily well designed, or beautifully designed. But your experience is inside of these design economies. So what we tried to understand was, what are they? How could you define them? It’s not that they’re ultimately discrete, in other words, the economy of movement in some ways is an energy economy. It’s about what forms of energy we use to create movement, and the experience that results from that approach. So in that sense, they’re not meant to be seen as discrete.
The image economy is just one section; every one of the other economies lives in some ways within the image economy, in the same way that they live within the market economy. It’s a complex set of interrelated economies. You just can’t imagine an economy of movement divorced from the image economy.

CATALYST: We are very interested in what Japan might teach us in what ways an economy might change, in what ways it needs to change. Do you have any thoughts about what we can learn, based on the most recent experience of natural disaster in Japan, and how Japan is working with that experience?
BRUCE: There are a number of lessons. I have to say that I found the whole episode extraordinarily revealing and horrific in many dimensions, but also challenging in many ways, and I would say inspirational in many ways. In the sense that, on the one hand, obviously the impact on the people and the sheer force of the natural world was absolutely extraordinary, I mean I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But at the same time, when you think about how resilient their systems are, in that context, that even with the absolutely amazing force of impact, and there are a staggering number of people who actually lived through it, and survived it. If you think about the level of design in that country, the level is so high that they could actually experience an earthquake at that magnitude and mostly survive, when in countries where you just don’t have that caliber of design development, the death toll would have been orders of magnitude greater.
At the same time it also reveals some fundamental challenges in the systems that we’re designing, especially in the nuclear system. You’re kind of balancing a can of kerosene with a candle on top of it, on something that is extremely fragile; that is in fact volatile in movement and motion. So the potential for disaster is there in such a big way.
I think that in some ways the disaster there exposed the potential that we have in many places around the world for that kind of impact. At the same time, you have to realize that for the most part, the industry has been extraordinarily safe; that we’ve been producing this kind of energy with almost no disasters, over decades. I’m just trying to understand, what does a post-crisis economy look like?
I think that it’s a really important series of investigations, because I think at this moment, we still only have one definition of a successful economy, and that is growth. If you listen to any day-to-day economic news, we can’t imagine an economy that is producing less, as a successful economy. We can only think of it as producing more.
I think that the challenge there is, how do we define ‘more’, in a way that isn’t a greater impact? That doesn’t demand more and more resources, and take away from the future of our children? Or leave them a bill, a toxic legacy in the way that we do it? And I think that’s a huge challenge as it is, about as big a challenge as we can imagine. What we have to do on top of that is, how do you do that in a way that is actually ‘growth’ more in greater possibility, and not defined in the negative, so that it isn’t defined as a future that is less than our past. Because so long as it’s defined that way, people will move away from it, they’ll move away from that kind of intelligence. No matter how brilliant it is, if it looks like sacrifice, they will move towards something else.
And though there will always be a group of hard-core, environmental thinkers who are happy to sacrifice in order to accomplish a new way, ultimately we have to get beyond that to a model that is not about sacrifice but is actually about a better experience, one that is more beautiful and more exciting.
I think that if ever there was an opportunity for a different way of thinking, and really exploring that possibility, it’s in a post-crisis condition.

CATALYST: It’s such a good example of when you say, “design is invisible… until it fails”, all of us watched the same images and watched design fail, and succeed in so many ways, so, thank you for the thoughts on that. Thank you for broadcasting your signal so clearly that we were able to pick up on it.
BRUCE: Thank you so much, truly. Very insightful and demanding questions.

CATALYST INSIGHT:
– Design requires collective, interdisciplinary, and collaborative teams capable to understand the systemic dimension of every object and the interconnectivity between the systems that support our way of living.
– Re-designing a new economy requires that we understand our way of living, redefine our concept of good life, and ultimately re-formulate our societal values.
– The design challenges of our time represent our success and flaws as a human race. They bring to us an opportunity to reach our potential as a society with possibilities never seen before.
– Design is far from isolated object outcomes. Design is about the collective visualization and creation of new possibilities of change that allow us to successfully face the challenges of growth.

STRATEGIES IN ACTION:
– Imagine a new definition of good life.
– Understand our capacity to realize our potential.
– Open a new conversation about our new possibilities and their challenges.
– Understand that particular outcomes require a design intent.
– Think and understand the role that every object plays within the invisible system that supports our way of living.
– Open to a new understanding of leadership that is not chronological or hierarchical.
– Face the challenges of success.
– Think about citizens instead of consumers.
– Build a new economy based on what society really quantifies, measures, and values.
– Design and visualize new possibilities for business.
– Design new collaborative models to solve the challenges of our time.
– Redefine a positive economic growth that gives to the future generations a greater experience, full of possibilities instead of sacrifices.

About the Author:

Bruce Mau is founder of the Massive Change Network. Mau’s clients included Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, MTV, Arizona State University, Miami’s American Airlines Arena, New Meadowlands Stadium, Frank Gehry, Herman Miller, and Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus. Through his work, Mau seeks to prove that the power of design is boundless, and has the capacity to bring positive change on a global scale. Working with his team of designers, clients and collaborators throughout the world, Mau continues to pursue life’s big question, “Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Bruce Mau sat on a stage in the ballroom of New York’s Grand Hyatt hotel, accompanied by Marc Mathieu, a senior vice-president of Coca-Cola. The event was a design industry trade show, and this session focused on Coca-Cola’s attempt to redesign its business to be more sustainable. Usually when corporate executives talk about sustainability, the challenge for listeners is to sustain interest.

But Mau livened up his presentation with dramatic gestures (at one point he held up his drinking glass and asked the audience, “What happens after this breaks?”), along with compelling images on an overhead screen. One of these showed a sea of plastic bottles – as if thousands of them had been dumped into the water. Then the view pulled back and it was more like hundreds of thousands. It pulled back again and it was more like millions.

This trade conference wasn’t the first time he’d shown the image; Mau had employed it very effectively in one of his early business meetings with executives at Coca-Cola. He’d wanted to give the company a jolt of “future shock”, so he presented the digitally doctored images backed up with real-world numbers that he’d projected for the next 50 years. “We showed those two million bottles,” Mau recalls, “and then I said to them, ‘What you’re seeing here? That’s nothing. Over the next 50 years, you will leave 2.2 trillion discarded bottles in the environment.'” And all those empty Coke bottles piling up all around, he said, would become a kind of anti-advertising for the brand.

Mau is at the forefront of a loose movement embracing a new way of thinking about design. It includes individual designers and larger companies like IDEO, as well as several prominent design schools, where new theories about “design thinking” are being developed: what it is, how it works, what it can accomplish. But this “glimmer movement” (the “glimmer” being when a life-changing idea crystallises in the mind) also includes people from outside the design profession – basement tinkerers, technologists, do-it-yourselfers, “crafties”, social activists, environmentalists, video-gamers and business entrepreneurs. What links them is their belief that everything today is ripe for reinvention and “smart recombination”. And what makes them all designers is that they don’t just think this, they act on it.

As the design conference wound down, the panel took questions from the audience; one questioner, a young man with an earnest manner, seemed poised to spring as he took the mike. He pointed out that Coca-Cola really isn’t very good for people; that it doesn’t contribute much to the health and wellbeing of the planet.

Therefore, he wanted to know: “Why not just stop making Coke? Why not start purifying water instead?” The Coke executive, Mathieu, seemed taken aback. But Mau was eager to answer because he felt the questioner was getting at something central to the whole discussion of business, consumption and sustainability. “I hear what you’re saying,” he said to the questioner, “but I don’t think ‘no’ is the answer to these challenges. Denial – just telling people you can’t do this or that – will not get us to where we want to be. We have to redesign the things we love so we can keep enjoying them.” Then, after a beat: “And I happen to love Coke.”

Mau observed later that, although the questioner might have seemed a tad eco and hippie for a business conference, he was also representative of what Coke and every other company is up against these days: a public that is more aware of, and concerned about, what firms are doing – and one that also has more ability to question and challenge business than ever before. Companies such as Coke are realising that they must adapt and adjust their behaviour to survive this new level of scrutiny.

This is where Mau’s principle, “Design what you do”, comes into play. It sounds simple, but it’s actually a radical use of the term “design”. Businesses are used to designing what they make (the products); they may also be used to designing what they say to the outside world (advertising and communications). But it’s more unusual to think of applying design principles and approaches to the full spectrum of a company’s behaviour – encompassing everything the company does, including what it does behind closed doors. Mau’s position is that there really is no “inside” the factory any more. Changing conditions are calling into question the long-held assumption in business that there are two separate realities: the one that is shared with the outside world (in the form of product offering, advertising, communications) and the one that is considered private (the way a company actually makes things, operates, treats its employees, disposes of its waste and generally conducts itself ). The internet has brought about an unprecedented level of transparency that allows the outside world to see – and to comment on – the way that a company performs and behaves.

Early in his career, Mau began to consider the idea that everything a business does matters; that every action communicates a message to the world and also has consequences on some level. “One day I saw a truck driver with a big rig,” he says, “and I had this moment of clarity where I thought, ‘That driver doesn’t know what’s in the truck.’ And we allow him to remain ignorant and to say, ‘My problem is getting whatever is in this truck to the right address. Whether it’s a dirty bomb or an order of hamburgers is not consequential to me.'”

Mau saw this kind of compartmentalised thinking as standard practice in business, and felt that it allowed industry to wreak havoc on the world. “It led companies to say, ‘We are only going to express our values when we’re communicating – but when we’re manufacturing and doing all these other things, we don’t have to worry about it, because those things aren’t visible.'” Although many businesses tend to compartmentalise, Mau, as a designer, tended to look for the connections between things. This was a particularly resonant idea with him because he’d grappled with the concept of “incorporation” which was the subject of one of his 90s

Zone books. He designed each book to create a richer, more immersive experience, “so that the experience correlated to the subject,” as he explains. So a book all about cities was designed not just to illustrate the qualities of urban environments, but to model those qualities, “to behave as a city does – with friction, congestion, things moving in opposite directions”. “The truth is that every object is not a separate thing but is incorporated into larger flows,” Mau says. Everything is connected.

This “incorporation” concept was much on his mind while researching his ground-breaking 2004 design exhibition, Massive Change, which started in Canada and moved to the US. He laid down some ground rules with the Vancouver Art Gallery, which commissioned it, namely: this was not going to be an art show. “I said, ‘I’ll do a show about the future of design, but only if we agree to take aesthetics off the table,'” he recalls. So he focused on design’s potential to solve problems and change lives. Or, as he puts it, “Instead of being about the world of design, it would be about the design of the world.” Design was no longer a subset of business, culture and nature. Instead, because of new technological advancements, increased sharing of knowledge and good old human ingenuity, it was now possible to design everything from a better corporate structure to better human body parts or a better breed of dog. How can we reboot and rebuild, people were asking, and do it better, do it more thoughtfully?

When Massive Change opened in autumn 2004, Time magazine called the show “a cabinet of wonders”. Mau filled two floors of the museum with gadgets, gizmos, oversize photomontages and, in one room, silver balloons. Among the various curiosities on display: a car that could be powered by human pedalling; the LifeStraw water filter, a small device that can be used, like a straw, to sip from polluted waters and drink cleanH2O; an old fuel engine rebuilt as a means of converting biomass into energy; self-healing plastic (whose cracks mend themselves); the low-cost laptop taken up by the One Laptop per Child initiative; the iBOT (Dean Kamen’s “walking wheelchair”); the “bicycle ambulance” designed to bring emergency medical services to areas in sub-Saharan Africa not served by automobile; a regenerated nose, stored in a clear refrigerated case; and a replica of a featherless chicken, biodesigned for warmer climates. The show was information-packed – breaking down and analysing everything from the global distribution of wealth to shifting urban demographic patterns – but Mau expertly “chunked” it into digestible nuggets that could be absorbed quickly as you moved through it. Each room explored a different subject, and as you entered Mau blasted you with the big idea – usually in the form of a bold declaration such as “We will eradicate poverty” – emblazoned in gigantic type. “We broke a lot of rules about what you’re supposed to do in museums,” he says. “We had eight to ten times as much content as you’re supposed to give people.” Using the design technique known as “wayfinding”, Mau plotted the path through the overall exhibit so that one idea flowed naturally into the next.

Over the next few years, a number of major design shows began to pick up and expand upon this theme. The National Design Triennial of 2006 focused on design’s connection to real-world issues and social problems. A separate show, Design for the Other 90 Per Cent – which featured simple design approaches to shelter, water-purification and transportation in the developing world – toured the US between 2006 and 2008. What surprised Mau was the way Massive Change seemed to resonate beyond the art-museum world.

Engineers and basement tinkerers saw it as a celebration of the underappreciated art of invention. Environmentalists took note of all the sustainable ideas on display, and soon Mau was fielding calls from Chicago mayor Richard Daley, seeking his input on how to make his city the greenest on Earth, as well as from a film-production team affiliated with the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, inviting Mau to be one of the stars of a film on global warming.

There was even a plea for help from a Guatemalan government official; he’d heard of Massive Change and wanted to know what Mau could do for a country going through hard times. (What he actually did was to hop on a plane and set up a massive exhibition staged across the country, highlighting the rich culture and enormous potential of Guatemala. It was hope made visible on a national scale.)

Perhaps the strongest response to the show came from the business world, including large companies such as Nokia, MTV and Coca-Cola. Mau had tapped into something that was just starting to emerge in business – a sense of urgency with regard to the need to embrace profound change. He was approached by a number of top executives, all wanting to know more or less the same thing: could the concepts behind Massive Change be applied to a major corporation? Was it possible for business to design not just more stuff, but a better and more productive future? Before long, Mau was meeting with these executives and starting up the process of asking them “stupid questions” and showing them his little sketches that just might transform their worlds. Parts of Mau’s exhibition dealt with biological and environmental issues and particularly with the ways in which complex ecosystems function. Every organism in a system affects and depends on what is around it, which means “there really is no ‘exterior’,” he says. He thought this notion of “no exterior” pertained to the business world too – that businesses had to stop dividing reality into “the company” and “the outside world”. Massive Change proposed that entities or organisations could transform themselves by designing new behaviours that adapted to change in the world around them. Cities could change, water-delivery systems could change, transportation could change – and companies could too. But to do so meant reworking a broad spectrum of activities. In business, that might include everything from the raw materials used to supply-chain issues to the way the employees are managed.

The Massive Change viewpoint was that all these separate functions should be seen as part of a completely integrated and thoroughly designed system. When Massive Change opened in 2004, the first wave of green marketing mania was just beginning to sweep through the business world and a number of major companies were starting to think about sustainability issues. Coca-Cola was one of them. The company was developing new marketing programmes with a greater emphasis on corporate social responsibility, and had put a French executive, Marc Mathieu, in charge of the effort. (Mathieu has since left the company.) When the Massive Change show came to the US in 2006, Mathieu flew to Chicago from Europe to see it. He says that he was hooked the moment he stepped into the Museum of Contemporary Art and saw the challenge Mau had posted in giant type at the show’s entrance: Now that we can do anything, what will we do? “That resonated with me,” Mathieu says – in part because it was a question Coke was grappling with.

He invited Mau to Coke’s Atlanta headquarters. As Mau immersed himself in Coke’s design history, he was surprised to learn that the company, in those early days, wasn’t just creating those elegant artifacts; it was also designing an industry from the ground up. The company drew up detailed plans on how to design corporate facilities right down to the shrubbery. In towns across America, Coke had figured out exactly where its advertising signs should be placed in relation to the town’s courthouse and its railway station. “They created design templates for everything,”

Mau says. He set out to redesign the mindset of Coke, and wrote and designed a manifesto around the idea of “living positively”, with a series of guiding principles for the company. One key mantra was “Create more of what we love, using less of what we need” – an attempt to reframe Coke’s thinking on sustainability, positioning it more as an opportunity than a chore. He felt the company would have to do a better job of integrating a variety of disciplines – manufacturing, purchasing, packaging, product development – so that these separate silos could work together to achieve the overarching sustainability goals.

As many a CEO knows, it can be difficult at large corporations to create cohesion across departments and divisions that are walled off from one another. “What you must try to do,” Mau says, “is work horizontally in a business culture that is vertical.” The overall operation of a business can be thought of as a design problem in which there are many interrelated challenges – and when you improve one, you may worsen another. For example, a company’s product development group may pat itself on the back for using recyclable materials, but in order to obtain that material the company may have to use additional shipping, which can negate the intended positive environmental effects.

Mau contends that bringing design solutions to bear on these mundane operational issues actually can end up saving money while also improving behaviour. He points to the example of UPS, which has redesigned its US truck delivery systems so that drivers make far fewer left turns. What’s wrong with left turns? They cause the drivers to sit idling in traffic, waiting for lanes to clear. By rerouting trucks and cutting down on those turns, UPS has cut fuel emissions significantly – but at the same time, it has also reduced its shipping expenses. Coke was in fact already doing a number of positive things, including various disconnected efforts to innovate its manufacturing methods and make them more sustainable. But hardly anyone knew about them, because they weren’t coordinated as part of a larger, more visible effort.

Mau was impressed by several programmes geared to water conservation: in one instance, a Coke bottling plant was using compressed air instead of water to clean the bottles. But many of the company’s social initiatives were catalogued in thick binders that few bothered to wade through. “You open one of those books and there’s so much in there, described in such a dry way, that you just want to close it and go have a beer,” Mau says.

He believes that Coke and other companies need to build critical mass behind their efforts to behave well – and that doesn’t necessarily mean companies have to do more good things. Sometimes companies take on too many small, random efforts. Mau believes that Coke could dispense with that thick binder and boil down those 6,000 commitments to, say, 100 high-impact programmes that would actually make more of a difference in the world – while also bringing more favourable attention to the company.

This is an idea Mau has been discussing not just with Coke, but with other clients including Arizona State University and MTV.

Instead of doing a bit of charity work here and there, he thinks these organisations should focus resources into a more clearly defined set of bigger, bolder initiatives.

What Mau is trying to do is rethink the way in which companies “do good”. The conventional way businesses achieve this involves setting up what’s generally known as a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) department, which is usually cut off from the rest of the business and focused on donating to various charities or setting up generic employee volunteer programmes. Mau, in one of his characteristically colourful turns of phrase, says that he views CSR programmes as “an island of intelligence in a sea of stupidity”. In other words, the company sets up one little isolated sliver of a department and says, “This is where all our good deeds will be done.” And that is supposed to make up for the company behaving any way it pleases in the other 95 per cent of its activities.

Mau thinks a better approach is for a company to demonstrate its corporate values through clear and identifiable actions. For example, if Coke were to pioneer bottling methods that set new sustainability standards; if it found a better way to transport its products; if it took the aggressive lead on tackling a particular social issue. Actions should be designed to fit with the company’s mission and personality, woven together in a way that has maximum impact on the world and on the image of the company.

Mau claims that “the potential for Coca-Cola to create a powerful social movement and to change the world is enormous”. But getting that to happen, he adds, is “like a turning around a very big ship”.

He has been grappling with the challenge of demystifying design for some time. Born and raised in a tough Canadian mining town, Mau, now 50, burst on to the international graphic design scene in the 80s, when his Toronto-based studio became known for its strikingly unorthodox use of type and images, featured primarily in the esoteric Zone books about culture and society.

Over the years, Mau kept expanding his applications of design.

He moved from the printed page to large public spaces – the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Seattle Public Library – where, working alongside the star architects Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, Mau became a design star in his own right. Then, a few years ago, Mau opted to widen his scope even more, as he began to view “the world” as his design project. In his work, his writings and his exhibitions, he proposed that design principles could be applied to the thorniest global issues.

Meanwhile, Mau also tried to take some of the fundamental design principles developed in his studio and go public with them. He took the first step when he wrote a document entitled “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth”, which started as an article and then was given as a speech at an international design conference in the late 90s. In the presentation, Mau laid out 43 “laws” for achieving good and meaningful design. The manifesto quickly became an internet phenomenon. A decade later, its laws are still passed back and forth on the web.

Many ideas in the manifesto are counter intuitive. Mau advised designers to “ask stupid questions”, to shamelessly imitate the work of others and to always, at all times, “forget about good”.

The manifesto was written in a weekend. Once he started writing, he says, “My ambition was to set out the patterns in the wild organic processes of innovation. I tried to articulate the way that we work – day to day, moment by moment – so that others might learn from the method we had developed.” After giving it to his sister-in-law, Mau then brought the manifesto with him to a design/tech conference in Amsterdam. The conference was all about the latest software applications and so everyone was surprised when Mau read the part of the manifesto that declared that “creativity is not device-dependent”. He urged the audience to put aside technology every once in a while and just “think with your mind”.

The techies loved it. Since then, Mau says, “No other product of the studio has had the distribution and resonance of the manifesto.

It seems to have a life of its own.” If you’re embarking on a life of design, or any creative endeavour, there are some rules from the manifesto that are worth bearing in mind, including:

Forget about good. Good is a known quantity.

Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good.

Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth. Mau thinks it is particularly important for people who want to innovate to disregard what other people think is “good”. Those who’ve brought about real change, he notes, “weren’t focused on making good design, they were concerned with making history”.

Study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Mau has always believed that a design studio should be a place of study and that designing should be an exercise in lifelong learning. Mau recommends making your own design studio, wherever it may be, into an environment that encourages learning.

Surround yourself with ideas; stock the place with books. Just don’t spend too much time arranging the bookshelf.

Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way and the separation might be truly remarkable. Designers and creators in general needn’t feel they must reinvent the wheel. They can start just by trying to make their own version of a wheel; along the way, with luck, they will add something new and then it will become an original design. In the meantime, who needs the pressure of being an “inventor” – of being the next Edison? It can stop you from ever getting started.

Slowdown. Desynchronise from standard timeframes and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

Much of daily life these days is spent reacting to endless stimuli – phone calls, meetings, emails, tweets – but those who can screen out the distractions and focus their attention on one thing, observes journalist David Brooks, “have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew”. To create an environment that lends itself to this kind of deep thinking, some people need a “quiet room”, whereas others opt for something more playful – New York designer Stefan Sagmeister takes periodic sabbaticals to remote places. At the time of writing, he was somewhere in Asia, unreachable except by hand-delivered letter.

But whether one journeys to another country or another part of the house, the goal is to end up, in Mau’s words, “lost in the woods” with a challenge or a problem that needs solving.

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

In his own work, Mau applies these principles to projects that have become increasingly complex: helping the country of Guatemala figure out how to design a better future for itself; finding new ways for the television network MTV to remain relevant. Mau has been enlisted by the president of Arizona State University, who wants to reinvent college education, as well as by Saudi Arabia, which approached Mau to help in possibly redesigning the holy city of Mecca to better accommodate the growing crush of the annual religious pilgrimages. Perhaps the strangest proposal came not long ago from Colombia, whose government asked for Mau’s help in an effort to rehabilitate former drug-dealing cartel members and welcome them back into society as functioning citizens. Attempting to socialise gang members and drug dealers: how would a designer even begin to approach something like that? Mau’s answer: “Very carefully.”

All of these diverse projects – from Fortune 500 companies going green to drug dealers coming clean – somehow find their way to the Bruce Mau Design studio, a bright and airy fourth-floor loft that overlooks Toronto’s Chinatown district (Mau is now based in a second studio in Chicago). At the studio, Mau is constantly on the move: when he does stop to sit and study a design problem, becoming deeply absorbed in it, he tends to tap his foot or jiggle his leg. He’s all bustling energy that cannot be contained. Mau loves surprises and incongruities. The artist in him is always sketching little visions of how things might be – and the engineer then has to figure out how to make it work.

Recently, Mau has been working with old clients MTV, Coke, Indigo stores and Shaw carpeting, shuttling back and forth on the Mecca project and looking forward to the opening of his Museum of Biodiversity in Panama. And he has new iterations of his Massive Change idea.

One involves a network of schools, or “centres for massive change”. This was a plan brought to Mau by one of his new partners, Seth Goldenberg, who suggested it might be possible to effectively franchise the concept of massive change to universities or companies, enabling them to set up their own design/innovation labs using Mau’s methodologies. He has also been working on an ambitious exhibition and public event for the Denver Biennial of the Americas, in mid-2010. Mau sees the event as a call to positive action (he’s named the event “In Good We Trust”) and to that end he hopes to focus the biennial not so much on art as on inspirational examples of recent innovations – a combination of TED conference and Obama campaign, with a dash of Bucky Fuller’s “World Game” thrown in. “Something is happening out there,” Mau states. “People are seeing the world around them with greater resolution, because there is more information available to them. For the first time, they are seeing patterns that have been invisible to the larger public in the past. We are moving toward global clarity – to people finally being to say, ‘Oh, I get it. Now I see what’s going on in the world.'” And what happens when everyone sees and understands and recognises the need for change? If you ask Mau, what happens next is – of course – design.

In Mau’s words: ‘Yes is more’ “When it comes to changing behaviour, we have 50 years of evidence that going negative doesn’t work. For over half a century, environmentalists have scolded us to ‘reduce’, ‘use less’, and, most pointedly, to ‘get out of your car!’ Over all those years, the total number of cars in the world inexorably increased. Last year alone we produced roughly 66 million new cars – adding four times as many cars to our roads as we did in the 60s. Around the world, many cultures and countries may not have fully embraced human rights or secular democracy – but they have embraced traffic. The few outposts that have yet to get cars in large quantity are desperate to have them. “Most innovation and advancement in energy efficiency is not to make cars lighter and cleaner, but to make them bigger and more powerful. As the bicycle-riding environmentalists scolded, we closed our power windows and turned up the air-conditioning. When it comes to changing attitudes about the environment, apparently

‘No!’ is not the answer we were looking for. Getting hit with a green stick has had little effect. “So how do we convince six-billion-plus people that changing the way they live is important? Think carrot, not stick. Seduction, not sacrifice. ‘Yes!’ not ‘No!’We must reimagine everything we do. But we must do so in a way that allows people to experience beauty, exhilaration, love, pleasure and delight. “There is only one way to make this happen: use design to make the things we love more intelligent. Embrace the revolution of possibility to radically reduce the material and energy consumed, while increasing the positive impact of the things we use. Make sustainable more compelling, more attractive, more exciting and more delightful than the destructive, short-term ways. Compete with beauty and make smart things sexy. “So far, we have failed in designing a real alternative to the car. Compare the bus and the car as experiences: there is a clear winner and loser. Why does my minivan have 17 cup holders – but my bus has none? Why is my bus shelter not heated, but I can start my car remotely and let it warm up? Why is my bus uncomfortable and noisy when I can listen to Beethoven in my car? My bus is a design failure. It’s a stick painted green, and out of desperation or inspiration I’m supposed to want the experience. In Toronto, the slogan of the transit company is ‘the better way’. Well, it’s not, and everyone knows it. Until the bus experience is more attractive and effective than the car, we will always be selling a losing proposition. “The same applies to the car. We must imagine the car as a product with a positive impact – not make our design objective a car that is less negative. We must design an ecology of movement options that are thrilling in every way, and that also fit together as an ecological, sustainable – but most important, sexy – system.

We have to get beyond ‘No!’ and define what ‘Yes!’ would look like – not simply continue to hope that one day we will somehow wake to a world of altruistic people who reject the car. ‘No’ is not the answer. Yes is more.”

Justin McGuirk: The conference we’ve attended these past few days reflected the fact that things have really changed in the world over the past six months, and I’d like to ask what the design community can do in the grand change agenda. I see this as a three-way conversation between very different parties. Bruce is an advocate of change in the designer-cum-politician style; I see Fiona and Tony as advocates of the near future who are constantly experimenting with what might be possible; and Marcel, you bring two things: one is the practical face of the design business but also an irreverence for politically correct discourse.

Bruce Mau: We may be different in certain respects, but there are a lot of similarities in our underlying ambitions. One of the big challenges we face is making new, more intelligent ways of doing things – more compelling and successful, more sexy, delightful and humane. One of the big problems in the environmental movement has been 40 years of “no”.

JM So you’re saying that we’ve been in the grip of vested interests, whether big business, the oil industry or government?

BM For me it’s not so deliberate. I think people ascribe intentionality where there is simply systematic stupidity or fumbling. If you think of the car, it’s probably the single most successful design development in human history, and it has produced some of the worst and most difficult challenges we face in the world. When we invented the car we solved the problem that we defined. But we didn’t define that other problem.

Marcel Wanders: There is this idea that people are more intelligent than animals because men are able to look three steps ahead and animals can’t. And I sometimes think that sheep are perhaps able to think 10 steps ahead, and that is why they do nothing. [Laughter] This is why we make so many mistakes because we think we can look three steps ahead but we cannot. Especially when you work in the world of designers – we “change the world” and that is a very strange responsibility.

BM I think that condition is changing a lot. One of the things we looked for when we did Massive Change [the book and exhibition] was to see if we were articulating global systems. If you go back to the original idea of Arnold Toynbee’s, which is “to imagine the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective”. It’s now 50 years later. If he was right, we should be visualising and articulating global systems so we can start to make better decisions. And that’s what we saw. We are slowly building a knowledge base that’s starting to inform the way we do things. People are starting to wake up to the nature of the challenges we face.

JM Can I just ask, does everybody here feel that something has changed in the past year, that there is a receptiveness to doing things differently, or is it just a mirage?

BM I think it’s coming in a much longer curve. I think when I said a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, I think that’s a bit of a shock that wakes people up from their cash-padded existence to the fact that we need to do things differently. People are suddenly saying the things that we’ve been doing were not really very bright. If we’re going to move forward we need to think about new ways of doing things. When we started Massive Change about four years ago we saw a global movement happening that was not well articulated. To a large degree it’s still invisible, but it is really taking shape.

MW The problem we have today is completely artificial. The real problems have been visible for such a long time already.

BM What is the artificial problem?

MW The artificial problem is that the banks organised themselves really badly. I think we’re now reacting to a technical problem but not the real problem.

JM The question is whether this current economic crisis is the catalyst that makes us finally deal with the more fundamental problems that have been around for so long.

MW It could work that way, and I hope that it will, but I’m not seeing it. Because we’d love to solve the technical problem first, then perhaps we have time left.

JM So if there’s a quick fix then we’ll take it?

 

Photo Jonx Pillemer

 

MW Absolutely.

Tony Dunne: Isn’t it also about evolving new desires? You could say there are too many cars and they’re damaging the environment, but unless we actually desire something different … I don’t mean as designers but as people who consume these things. That’s the role design can play: creating new desires, or encouraging them.

BM We invented those desires in the first place. People did not desire the car 200 years ago – we produced it. There is a kind of cynical dimension, too, of inventing desires that are unnecessary. I would be looking to try to maximise those. What is exciting to me is seeing young people and their commitment to a new definition of what design is going to become.

Fiona Raby: Designers are definitely changing with the younger generation. It’s less materialistic, more about gathering and eating; it’s experiential – just experiencing things and enjoying them but not necessarily having things.

MW It was the same when we were young!

FR I think it’s different.

JM There is this new movement in architecture which is all about participation. And internet culture is becoming all about participation. Young people like the idea of doing things together and communicating constantly. There’s been a subtle shift in the way people do things through social networking. Even I’m too old for it – it’s people in their twenties or teenagers doing it.

TD But do they have dreams? When we were growing up in the Sixties and Seventies [Laughter] OK, the Nineties … there were all these dreams about travelling to the moon that you were just born into. They’re all popping one by one now. Are we going to dream new dreams or are we just panicking and running around trying to put fires out?

BM This young guy came up to me after my presentation and he described the problem he is facing. He said: “The feeling that I have is like trying to put hazy things into fixed boxes – like trying to put clouds into boxes.” It’s clear that there is an energy to get to a clear articulation, to move beyond the idea of the singular ideology or solution, which has plagued our society, to a new diverse, plural, collaborative, connective way of thinking, and that’s exciting. It’s not been named or clearly defined but it is emerging.

FR There’s an insecurity to it though, that when you’re connected to lots of people there is no direction. There is a sort of fuzziness to all this interconnectedness. Maybe it’s just existential angst. [Laughter] Our students are amazing. They are connected and fearless. Before we know it they’ve emailed philosophers and Twittered and all these things but there is a worry.

TD I think there is a kind of conformism to the group thing. There is a “Let’s check what everyone else thinks”, where as when you were disconnected you would just act.

FR It’s about trying to be holistic. It takes faith because you don’t have a strong direction or a definite goal, you have to feel for the edges.

BM And that is a revolution. In our experience with organisations, especially educational organisations, the idea of a non-defined objective where we know the qualities of experience we want to produce without knowing what the end is, is unthinkable. In some ways it’s almost the definition of design. But for education, because schools are committed to measurement, its about constantly looking to define exactly what is going to happen. If you say, actually, the whole idea is that you don’t know, their hair catches fire.

JM This is very idealistic, because governments don’t see it this way, do they? They set targets, for instance, to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent.

MW It’s funny because, going back through my life, I have always had clear goals: I’d have my five-year plan. Two or three years ago I started to think it was superficial and I decided that you cannot have goals any more because if you are really creative you do new things; you cannot decide to go there because you are not there yet. You can only decide what direction to go.

TD Rather than having a goal, you have an ethos. When opportunities come your way you apply your values to turn left or right.

MW I wouldn’t expect organisations to work that way because it’s too out of control.

BM I think the whole enterprise is being reconsidered. There’s this project by Paul Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute called the Wiser Earth project to make an inventory of all the organisations in the world who are working to solve social and ecological problems, and they already have 105,000. If you think about the whole NGO sector, it’s basically saying let’s take this model of enterprise and attach it to a purpose, and the purpose isn’t profit, the purpose is a contribution to an improved condition. So it’s actually starting to introduce models of a new kind of ethic. I think of the crisis not as an economic one but as a social, ethical, ecological and economic crisis all rolled together into one thorny beast of a problem.

JM So you’re talking about the demise of capitalism, effectively?

BM It’s not so much the demise, it’s about understanding how best to deploy the models of the market and how best to deploy social models and new connectivity models. When I made the presentation about what we’re doing in Denver, one of the journalists said: “You’re totally socialist.” And I said, well, actually I don’t think in that kind of binary opposition of left and right, I think in an axis that is 90 degrees to that which is about advanced and retrograde. And you can see advanced things going on across the whole spectrum. Take someone like Mohammad Yunus, he’s using the market as a model to deliver positive human impact. On the other side you have people like Jaime Lerner in Brazil, using the social to deliver the best conditions for economics. So I don’t think they’re at odds with one another. But I think you’re right about this being a new kind of ethic.

 

Photo Jonx Pillemer

 

MW It feels like we’re going into rehab.

BM Well it is like we’ve been in a drunken stupor.

TD It was unrestrained, being able to do really whatever we want, consume whatever we want, and then as you say, there’s a technical problem making us realise that somehow these unleashed desires have to be redirected. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it was just enjoying life, enjoying what the system allowed us to enjoy.

JM Bruce, to promote your foundation you’ve started resorting to a kind of “change” propaganda. Maybe that’s necessary. It’s like the good news channel. We need to change news-making so it’s not all bad news. If people realize that there are a lot of good things happening they switch to that mode of thinking.

TD If a million people cancelled their subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal things would change. It almost seems that it’s over to us to stop doing things.

MW I believe it’s our generation that has to solve this. We are the people able to do it.

FR But I wonder, how is it possible to keep the younger generation happy that this kind of fuzziness, the no-goal condition, is actually sustainable and desirable, rather than going back to an old condition of singular [thinking]. We work with engineers and technologists and it’s all goal oriented. Trying to unpick this linear process is what our work has been about. We never get science funding because we can’t write proposals that are goal orientated, that can guarantee outcomes. How can you write the fuzzy stuff into funding applications? Science gets all this money and it’s all goal orientated, so to put the ethic and the social stuff into it is impossible at this moment.

BM I think there are projects moving in that direction. There a 105,000 organisations in some way committed to that way of thinking and it’s so diverse. Paul Hawken does this incredible presentation about this new condition, there’s a wonderful video online, and he talks about diversity. He says we’ve had these singular ideologies that were at war against one another when in fact what we needed was complexity and diversity. If you think about it ecologically, we know as ecologists that that’s where the strongest systems are. Strong systems are not singular, strong systems are the diverse ones.

MW And what about financial systems? That’s our little technical problem.

BM What’s happening now is a redefinition of wealth away from a singular definition of money. So people are starting to think about a wealth of information and connectivity, these are new forms of wealth that we’re inventing. One of the things we looked at in Massive Change was that the market is not a natural environment, it’s a designed space, and how we design it determines what has value, and it’s radically being reconceived. There are all kinds of new markets being invented in the exchange of values that are entirely different. Look at something like freecycle, which is an online free distribution of unused things. You put something you want to get rid of on your front porch, you put it on freecycle and at the end of the day someone else is using it. There’s no money involved. It’s a huge area of redesign.

FR Our generation has the mentality to pass on, but the younger generation has the network. They’re not listening to authority, and are bypassing official channels. That’s why I am more hopeful for the younger generation than for ours. The power structures can be unpicked more from the younger generation than ours.

BM One of the things we have to offer is to get out of the way.

MW It is too easy to say the next generation will do it.

FR I’m not saying that.

BM I’m not saying that either.

TD It’s that we are trying to take responsibility for our actions but we are somehow tangled up in it all, more than the next generation.

FR I think we can give them courage, confidence and value systems so they can deal with messy situations and not have insecurities. Because they’re going for it, but there’s a little niggle going on of, well, should this be more goal orientated? And we’re saying no, this is life.

BM You need to promote and communicate new possibilities. One of the most interesting things we encountered in Massive Change was an idea from Stewart Brand who said: “If people think things are bad and getting worse they behave selfishly”. It’s a natural response to protect yourself and your family and take what you can while you can still get it. On the contrary, when they see people investing in the future they want to be a part of that. It goes back to the question of the news, because the reality is incredibly positive but you get the feeling we are going to hell in a handcart. All I hear is that “it’s over”. We need a voice to say look at what people are really doing – it’s incredibly positive. If you see 105,000 organisations moving this way you think how can I be part of that?

JM But I also see old structures firmly in place. Take the car industry in America: even though it’s increasingly moribund, Obama’s not going to defy those unions and retrain those people to make electric cars. The vested interests are still so powerful. But if you really wanted to switch everybody to making electric, you could do it.

BM There’s actually amazing things going on in that regard. One of the things we underestimate is the capacity for reorientation. What happened during the Second World War was that in something like 14 months America retooled the entire American industrial system. They went from producing consumer goods to confronting this problem in some insanely small amount of time. So we know that these things can be done.

MW We’re the old world, we’re more slow.

BM But that’s where America and the new world can actually contribute a lot. If you said to me three years ago Bush is out Obama’s in I’d have said you’re crazy.

MW I’ve been teaching quite a bit, as soon as I left school, and I always knew exactly what to say about how design should be, and then at one point I had no idea any more, which was better because I was just supporting. I would be completely uncritical and love everything they dreamed of doing. The only thing I think you should do as a teacher is support the crazy, stupid ideas people have, because why would you tell people what to do when you don’t know yourself. And I started to see how difficult it was to be that way in a schooling situation.

JM People want to be told what to do.

MW It’s not about teaching creativity its about teaching people what to do and it’s really fucked up. After that I quit teaching. Now when they ask me I say I can stay only one year because I’m going to fuck up your whole system. So I’ve been an anarchist in schools and the thing is to be only non-critical, and say: “That’s fabulous!”

TD I think there’s another position where you can understand the space students want to work in, from the crazy to the more subversive, and to try and work with them to produce better work. You don’t have to step back and say it’s all brilliant. But you don’t have to impose your perspective on what design is.

BM One of the worst things that has happened in the arts is we conflated negative and critical.

TD Yes, if you offer an alternative you’re being critical. It can be quite optimistic.

MW The one thing that should be the most important word in design is fantasy. Why isn’t that the most important word in design? It’s lost behind piles of smart thinking.

TD Fantasy can be serious – it’s a space of pure imagination. You can do all sorts of things in that. A lot of people don’t get to that space. I think there can be seriousness with fantasy but it needs to be attached to brilliant imagination. A lot of stuff happens in a very limited, mundane space whether it is fun or serious, it never gets to this visionary, imaginative zone.

BM It’s probably because it goes straight to that negative space that is not really critical. The most critical thing we can do is to invent a new exciting way. You do that, and you blow everything away.

JM In a way, Marcel, what I like about your idea of non-criticality – because it’s completely opposite to how I think – is students can’t be afraid of bad ideas. You’re never going to get anything interesting without a few bad ideas.

MW I forbid people officially to make good things – after school you can make good things. In school you should make all the mistakes you can. That is the way to learn.

JM That siren means they’re closing the mountain because of the high wind. We need to get out of here. Thanks everyone.

For Bruce Mau, design is a way to help solve the planet’s biggest problems. That’s why he hopes to start a global conversation about how to create change in the world.

Back in 2002, when Bruce Mau was less in demand than he is now, the Canadian designer was entertaining some two dozen prospective projects. Mau couldn’t seem to resist the lure of a new challenge. At the same time, his interdisciplinary design practice, Bruce Mau Design Inc., was reeling from a series of projects that were critically acclaimed but largely unprofitable. The studio’s manager, Jim Shedden, was losing patience. Feeling the sagging economy’s squeeze, and pressure for the place to grow up, Shedden wasn’t amused by Mau’s unflagging juggling act.

So one day, Shedden jotted down each project’s name on a separate piece of paper and laid each page face-up on a table. He then told Mau to turn over every single page, except one–the project that he most wanted to take on. Before long, Mau turned all but five pages over. At Shedden’s insistence, he eventually made his choice.

But Mau kept mulling over other possibilities. Days later, he returned to Shedden with an idea that wasn’t even on the table: Take those final five proposals–an exhibition on the future of design, an experimental design program for a city college, a product line for housewares maker Umbra, a television series on design, and a book with Phaidon, the studio’s publisher — and combine them into one gargantuan, groundbreaking endeavor.

Today, those five ideas form the foundation of the 45-year-old designer’s biggest project to date: “Massive Change” — a traveling multimedia exhibition that amounts to a global catalog of many of the world’s most innovative projects as seen through the lens of design. This past October, the exhibition debuted at the Vancouver Art Gallery; since then, its ambitious mandate for design has won it worldwide attention. The two-year international tour is scheduled to hit Chicago, with plans under way for additional venues abroad. The exhibition’s message: Design can reframe the world in unfamiliar and meaningful ways to help solve the problems–social, economic, environmental, political–that stand in the way of progress.

The Road to “Massive Change”
It’s the Monday morning before the kickoff of “Massive Change” in Toronto, Mau’s hometown. Outside the Art Gallery of Ontario, the words Massive Change–big, black, in the stark typeface of Mau’s choice, Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed–are emblazoned across the museum’s entrance, along with a giant photograph of a pink, featherless chicken. Inside, Mau is pacing the floor, talking with his hands flying; as usual, his loose black shirt is untucked. His commanding presence is occasionally punctuated by a burst of laughter. In due time, he will explain the deal with the chicken. Right now, he’s about to give dozens of his staffers a tour of nothing less than, as Mau himself puts it, “the design of the world.”

When most of us think about design, we tend to picture its outcomes–Apple’s iPod, Ford’s Mustang, Nike’s Swoosh. Mau is drawn to the innovative thinking that went into creating those icons. Case in point: A cluttered room in the exhibit is papered with life-size, color photographs of the workshop belonging to Dean Kamen, the modern-day inventor. On one side stands a series of prototypes of Kamen’s Segway Human Transporter, the two-wheel electric scooter. On another are a half-dozen more prototypes of Kamen’s wheelchair, the one that climbs stairs. Neither invention is exactly high impact–yet–but that’s not entirely the point. Mau revels in possibility. He wants to make visible the thing that’s often hidden in a design show: the thinking. “A lot of the most interesting design is invisible,” he says. “So we took the visual off the table and focused instead on the things that design makes possible.”

For Mau, design is a powerful tool that’s best used to attack vexing problems. The exhibition leads viewers through spaces defined by challenges where there are new opportunities–many spurred by technology–for design to play a problem-solving role. There is, for example, a humble but elegantly designed purifier that makes drinking water accessible to the developing world. More than anything, Mau’s goal is to push people to rethink their preconceptions about design and what design can accomplish.

During an hour-long tour, Mau navigates his staffers through a hopeful spectacle. It ranges from relatively straightforward medical devices and a curtain wall of recyclables–FedEx boxes, Coke cans, Styrofoam cups strung like popcorn–to a replica of a featherless chicken bred to withstand tropical climates and a giant, hand-drawn map indicating the untapped solar energy in the world’s poorest countries. Of course, Mau’s designers are familiar with the creative process’s messy starts and stops. They understand that he’s trying to make Kamen’s iterative mental model (and others like it) apparent to the rest of us. But for most of them, this is their first time seeing the show, live and up close. The reason: They weren’t part of the actual project–which is, instead, the work of a bunch of (mostly) thirtysomething students.

Mau’s studio is a think-and-do tank that’s housed in a sun-drenched loft space on the edge of Toronto’s Chinatown. It is home to about 40 employees–a stable of filmmakers, architects, writers, and artists–many of whom affectionately call the studio “Bruce Mau University.” It is also home to the Institute Without Boundaries, the in-house school that Mau formed in collaboration with George Brown College, the local city college that had approached him three years ago. The school wanted to create an innovative, experimental program on design; Mau pitched his own studio’s project-based learning environment.

The students’ assignment was to create the extravaganza that became “Massive Change,” including the book, Web site, radio show, and product line that accompany the exhibition. Mau supplied the vision–a rough scheme that he concocted on a five-hour plane flight–and then unleashed a team to research it, stretch it, flip it, break it, and otherwise workshop the hell out of it. Ultimately, the school is a prototype for using extreme collaboration to take on the demands of a major public project. The team brought together people from different backgrounds–from social science to business to design itself. “We created the dirty dozen,” says Greg Van Alstyne, the school’s director and Mau’s first employee. “We wanted people with different skill sets to push themselves as hard as they could and learn from each other.” Leaders such as Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, are paying attention. “It’s proving the power of interdisciplinary thinking in the realm of design,” he says.

All Change, All the Time
Mau is an unlikely design revolutionary. The son of a nickel miner, he grew up on a farm six hours north of Toronto. His parents were divorced when he was in grade school; his father was an alcoholic. He lived in a “crazy, violent environment,” he says. Eventually, he attended what was then called the Ontario College of Art, in Toronto. He lasted all of 18 months before dropping out.

He struck out on his own path. At 23, he cofounded a three-person design studio called Public Good. The vision was simple: Do work that matters. Three years later, he launched Bruce Mau Design. His first assignment was to create a series of titles for New York-based Zone Books. He found early success with highly conceptual graphic-design work for volumes on such subjects as urbanism, philosophy, and critical theory. Those designs informed many of Mau’s subsequent projects.

In the early 1990s, he designed S,M,L,XL, a 1,300-plus-page book on the studio of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Rejecting the traditional lines between designer and author, Mau contributed to the text as well as the graphics. Then there’s the collaboration with architect Frank Gehry, Mau’s mentor. Their work together has evolved from designing signs–which Mau had never done before Gehry approached him with a proposal for the Walt Disney Concert Hall (new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic)–to an exhibition for a biodiversity museum.

Today, the studio’s agenda is all “Massive Change,” all the time. Projects are now viewed through the exhibition’s wide lens. Last fall, when a high-profile, ad-hoc group of Guatemalan business leaders, educators, and artists approached Mau to design a book on the country’s future, he persuaded them to create instead a 10-year vision for the country–a framework that would help its citizens navigate political, environmental, and economic possibilities.

“The stakes are high enough in an art gallery,” says Shedden.

“But we’re talking about playing a modest role in helping to reinvent a country–to change people’s fundamental ideas about who they are and who they could become.”

Mau is attempting to reframe design in a broader cultural context — and some people are put off by that endeavor. Skeptics wonder whether the “Massive Change” model can live up to its lofty goals. They knock the exhibition’s mental leaps (“Everything = City = Design = Hope”) and splashy pronouncements (“We will build a global mind”). In Toronto, there’s a debate over whether “Massive Change” and its featherless-chicken mascot should even be featured in an art museum. Mau seems unperturbed. “Massive Change” chronicles achievements, for the simple reason that Mau believes that success is contagious. It inspires action.

Ultimately, the project is imperfect and ever evolving, by design. Taken in its many forms, it amounts to a rough map of the world’s change makers. What’s missing from the map is noteworthy–Mau’s own accomplishments. “We don’t claim to be there yet,” he says. “We’ll carry on with our work in hopes that one day we will be.”

Christine Canabou, a former Fast Company staff writer, will attend the Harvard Design School this fall.

A version of this article appeared in the June 2005 issue of Fast Company magazine.

Bruce Mau’s influential studio works with a roster of world-renowned clients. But its most enduring contribution may be to the theory and practice of design itself — from what kinds of projects are worth taking on to how to design for creative growth.

It’s tough to tell, at first, exactly what Bruce Mau Design is. Inside the high-ceilinged loft space on the edge of Toronto’s Chinatown are tall metal bookshelves, drafting tables, digital-video editing suites, architectural models, and scores of hard-working professionals. The deadline pressure is palpable, and couriers make breathless entrances and exits throughout the afternoon. Even as 6 PM approaches, not one employee makes a move to head for home. Instead, everyone on staff clusters around a tray of fresh fruit brought in by Cathy Jonasson, the firm’s vice president and managing director.

No wonder. Bruce Mau Design Inc. is handling more projects simultaneously than ever before: a massive, eight-screen multimedia installation called “Stress” for an art festival in Vienna; a corporate-identity campaign for a chain of storage facilities in England; signage for the Seattle Public Library; a master plan for a new park in Toronto; and a book called Life Style. But BMD is not an architecture firm or a book publisher. And it doesn’t employ a single graphic designer.

BMD is a studio in the purest sense of the word. “The word ‘studio’ derives from ‘study,’ ” says BMD founder Bruce Mau, 40. “We’re all about studying things — business problems, design problems — with our clients. Usually, clients want to study something very specific — a new identity, or a new product. Ideally, the studying benefits both of us. Our object is not to know the answers before we do the work. It’s to know them after we do it.”

Mau’s studio is an ongoing experiment in the best way to design an organization for long-term creative growth. Employees jokingly call the place “Bruce Mau University,” both for the intellectual freedom that it gives them, and for the support and the gentle prodding that Mau himself provides. Most of the people here could earn more at one of the city’s Web-design shops or commercial-architecture firms, but they stay at BMD because it affords them the ability to work on a wide range of high-quality projects. Indeed, Mau refuses a lot of work because, as Jonasson, 49, puts it, “the studio is populated by a bunch of restless minds. We are pushing one another constantly. We learn from one another. Here we have the chance to do really good work without having to deal with politics or corporate bureaucracy.”

It’s not easy managing a stable of filmmakers, architects, writers, and artists — all of whom have direct client contact; collaborate with world-renowned architects such as Frank Gehry and blue-chip cultural institutions such as the Getty Center, in Los Angeles; and expect (as Mau does) to be exploring new terrain every day.

“The project of the studio is its own design project,” says Mau, who has a pensive, low-key air that is occasionally punctuated by a burst of laughter, and who wears his loose, long-sleeved shirts untucked. “It’s largely a social project,” he continues. “It’s 90% about people and 10% about selecting the right business. You have to ensure that the work — and the time that people spend on it — is meaningful.”

People and Projects — Designs for Success

Bruce Mau founded BMD in 1985 to design a series of titles for New York – based Zone Books. Although the firm has built an impressive roster of clients over the past 15 years — including the Andy Warhol Museum; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the Gagosian Gallery; Roots, a Canadian clothing retailer; and Vitra, a Swiss furniture company — BMD still produces about six books a year for Zone. Since one of the hardest aspects of any BMD project is figuring out how to work productively with a client, Mau prizes longevity. In terms of what kind of work Mau does, there are really no boundaries: BMD does book design, logos, store interiors, signage, landscapes, film, magazines, and museum exhibits.

In designing an environment where creative people can do their best work, Mau has consciously steered clear of structure, regimentation, and rigid processes. He has drawn a distinction between the two types of gatherings at BMD: meetings and what he calls “workings.” Meetings exist to take care of mundane administrative issues, and they’re extremely infrequent. Much more common are workings — gatherings at which Mau and his staff generate or refine ideas, often in the company of clients.

BMD does, however, track hours — even though, as studio manager Jim Shedden, 37, says, designers are “allergic” to the concept. And employees don’t always track their time in conventional ways. Senior designer Chris Rowat, 31, describes a recent Wednesday like this: “15 minutes focusing on infinity, 15 minutes refocusing on my monitor.” Actually, Rowat has been crunching to design a big section of Mau’s book, Life Style — a collection of essays about Mau’s career, the studio’s work, and the culture of design that is due to be published by Phaidon Press in November.

Mau’s two central concerns are hiring the right people and selecting the right work. He is clear about what kinds of projects he wants to work on. “We have what we call the ‘Four Ps’ checklist,” he says. The four “P”s stand for “people,” “project,” “profit,” and “plate.” Mau evaluates whether a client is someone he’d enjoy working with. He asks whether the project is one that BMD could learn from, as well as whether the firm can make money doing it. Finally, he considers how the project would fit onto BMD’s plate: What impact would it have on the already-overcommitted team?

Screening clients this carefully sends a message to employees that every project is important. And since BMD doesn’t have a marketing brochure or a sales staff, the body of work that the studio produces also serves as its most visible advertising. “Chasing business is not the right way to get business,” Mau says. His system works surprisingly well. Several years ago, a set-design project for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s dance troupe led to a commission to produce a new visual identity for the Museums of the City of Antwerp, in Belgium.

On the people front, BMD has taken a similarly quiet and quirky approach. Many employees find out about the studio through word of mouth, or through art internships. “The studio is an ecology,” Mau says. “It can only absorb certain kinds of people, so we’re super rigorous. Explosive growth doesn’t work for me. We want to grow in a more natural way and maintain the ecology. I feel like a guardian. Bringing in the wrong kinds of people poisons the garden.”

In the summer of 1999, Mau ran a recruitment ad in an alternative Toronto weekly. Rather than following the standard help-wanted format, though, Mau created the ad in the form of a quiz. The headline was one of Mau’s favorite catchphrases: “Avoid fields. Jump fences.” There were 40 questions, from “Who designed Toronto’s New City Hall?” to “Who made a film consisting of nothing but the color blue?” (Answers: Viljo Revell and Derek Jarman.)

The ad became something of a phenomenon. It generated responses not only in the form of letters and résumés, but also via Web sites, books, and sculptures. “It was just phenomenal,” Mau recalls. “Everyone in town heard about it.” The ad brought BMD three new employees, and an infusion of outside contractors and collaborators. “It also brought in a stack of résumés that we continue to draw from,” Mau says. “We’re planning to run an ad every year, not to fill specific job openings but to keep shaking the tree. We’re looking for a very specific kind of person” — not necessarily people who think of themselves as designers but people who use design to think through problems — “and we figure there’s a lot of talent that’s stuck in the wrong place.”

Mau already has his headline for the next ad: “The Test of Character Is Multiple Choice.”

Design Principles

Since childhood, Mau has chosen never to hew to a particular job description, and he doesn’t expect his employees to either. Hence the motto “Avoid fields. Jump fences.” Growing up in Sudbury, Ontario, a nickel-mining town six hours north of Toronto, Mau studied science and engineering, but he worried that his adult life might consist of soldering circuit boards. In high school, he knew that he wanted to make a change, but his guidance counselor told him that it was too late. “I said, ‘Surely, my fate can’t be sealed at the age of 16,’ ” recalls Mau. The guidance counselor found a program for people who wanted to go to art school but who didn’t meet the academic prerequisites.

“It was called Special Art,” Mau says. “It was a year of doing nothing but art, and it changed my life.” Mau immersed himself in drawing, ceramics, and photography, and he learned how to use the school’s one-color offset lithography press to produce full-color prints. His work, including the design of his school’s commencement program, was so good that the admissions staff at what was then called the Ontario College of Art, in Toronto, was skeptical that he had done it by himself.

Mau’s trip to Toronto for his college-admission interview was his first trip ever to a big city. He was accepted, but he soon found his courses too elementary. So he started sitting in on the senior classes. “I was getting honors in the fourth-year classes and hassles in the first-year classes,” Mau says. When he decided to show his own drawings, instead of his official class work, at a school exhibition, the department chair chastised him, and Mau dropped out of school.

He quickly found a job at Fifty Fingers — one of Toronto’s hot, young design studios. A year later, he moved to London to work at Pentagram Design Inc. — a large, international design firm. While both positions helped Mau sharpen his skills, his outspokenness didn’t help his popularity at Pentagram. “We were expected to be like slaves: Listen to your boss, and just do it,” he says. When Mau quit Pentagram after a year and a half, his supervisor told him that one of the senior partners had long been suspicious of him. Why? “I was working late a lot, because I was interested in the work,” Mau says. “And this partner said, ‘No one here works like that.’ “

Mau returned to Toronto in 1983 and cofounded a three-person studio called Public Good, where he created ad campaigns and informational materials for unions, government agencies, and cultural institutions. Eventually, Mau left Public Good to start BMD and work on the Zone Books series. “We designed the first Zone dummy in seven days,” he says. “If you had to produce a calling card as a young designer, you couldn’t do better. Zone went to all of the right institutions, schools, and studios. I had an international practice immediately.”

Mau’s reputation continued to build as he designed more projects for Zone Books, as well as various projects for the Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and the Getty Center, in Los Angeles. His career mushroomed in 1998 when he gave a presentation at the influential Doors of Perception conference, in Amsterdam. After two days of lectures about technology, Mau took the stage to speak about personal creative development. He titled his talk “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” and it had nothing to do with computers. It consisted of 43 suggestions and admonitions, such as “Make mistakes faster,” “Allow events to change you,” and “Ask stupid questions.”

“The audience went crazy,” Mau remembers. “At the end of this barrage of technology, I was saying that creativity is device-independent. I was asking the audience to use its noodle.” The manifesto was later published in I.D. magazine, where Mau had served as art director for a time. It was translated into Italian, Swedish, and several other languages, and it became a viral phenomenon on the Web. It was posted in newsgroups and circulated by email. “The oddest thing I heard was that a New Zealand company had used the manifesto on its corporate Web site,” says Mau. “It has taken on a life of its own.”

Creativity by Design

Designing an organization for creative growth, to Mau, means unhitching it from a single “guru” figure and allowing the entire group to help shape the work process — from brainstorming to final product. Many creative groups, like architecture firms or ad agencies, rely on a single central authority to define their style and to approve the work being done on a given project. BMD has tried to avoid that “hub and spoke” system.

That model “is all about a single person’s productivity and [design] sensibility,” says Mau. “What we have is more of a cellular system. We’re all interdependent; no one is totally dependent on me. And the culture creates its own stylistic sensibility. People who have been here for years have contributed to it, and new people add to it. That model has more of an unlimited growth potential. It’s not confining.”

Mau doesn’t flit around the office dispensing guidance and feedback in small doses. Instead, he delves deeply into a few projects — usually in areas where the studio is trying to break new ground or to develop a new competency like editing digital video — and very lightly follows the progress of others. “I don’t want to limit what we do just because my time is limited,” he says. “I did a lot of book design for the Zone series in the early days, for example. Other people work on that project now, though I still serve as creative director. They do a better job than I could, because the project isn’t new to me anymore. When I worked on Zone, I was always a different person coming out the other side of each book. I want to give other people that kind of experience now.”

On a Wednesday afternoon in April, Mau spends several hours sitting with the team that is reworking a section of “Stress,” a 45-minute video that debuted the previous weekend at the du Maurier World Stage festival, in Toronto, and that will be shown throughout the summer in Vienna. The section is titled “Blitzkrieg.” It doesn’t yet contain any of the signature blitzkrieg images from World War II, but Mau wants to insert a few. Rather than dictating changes to the employees, he merely sits in the editing bay, watches a string of video clips, and mostly agrees on which pieces of footage would work best. In the end, the team decides not to add the blitzkrieg images.

“Bruce is demanding, but he’s not prescriptive,” says Cathy Jonasson. Jonasson left a prestigious curatorial position at the Art Gallery of Ontario — and took a 20% pay cut — to work at BMD. “Mau is very good at looking at someone’s work and finding the best in it. People leave him feeling good about their work and knowing what they have to do to make their work even better. He constantly emphasizes what you mightcall the ‘Mau method’: Ask the right questions, understand the problem, and explore lots of possible solutions.”

BMD is also unusual in that Mau doesn’t always serve as the front man, attending client meetings while others do the real work. There are no account executives who “manage” clients either. “In most other design firms, there are lots of layers between the client and the person doing the design,” observes Chris Pommer, 37, a senior designer who is working on the Seattle Public Library project. “Bruce puts us in contact with the clients. In most cases, we have more contact with them than he does. I feel that responsibility directly. If I promise something to a client, I’ll stay late to get it done. It would be different if it were a promise that someone else made to the client. Mau delegates a tremendous amount of responsibility to the designers here.”

While their approach is an aesthetic one, the designers at BMD are constantly asking questions about clients’ goals. Those questions can be anything from helping library visitors find the bathroom, to transforming a former industrial compound and airport into an inviting urban park, to repositioning a chain of storage centers in the minds of consumers. By producing models and sketches for clients, the design team at BMD can help its clients shape the customer experience. “We try to make the circumstances of their business vivid in a way that typical business planning doesn’t,” says Kevin Sugden, 39, a senior designer who is working with Access Storage Space, one of the largest self-storage companies in Europe.

With Access, “we’re doing an identity, ostensibly, but it’s also a definition of the company,” Mau explains. “Nothing could be more generic than empty space, but if you define that space with a metaphor, you create value. We asked, What could this space become?”

Sugden and the Access team created a set of playful posters that offered different scenarios for what the company might choose to represent to its customers: workroom, living room, playroom, breathing room, clean room, storage room. “Scenarios give people a chance to think about what they want to be-come,” says Sugden. “Do they want to become a museum-like archive; a main street, where people bump into one another and engage in conversations; or a super-automated, techie storage facility?”

Adds Mau: “We’re using the techniques of design and communications to do something new — to get to the essence of the business.”

Designs on the Future

The atmosphere at BMD is intense and deadline-oriented, but somehow, the creative percolation never boils over. This fall, Mau’s “The Culture of Work” project will start to surface, partly through a partnership with the high-end Swiss furniture company Vitra. Mau conducted his own wide-ranging inquiry into what it means to be creative in the workplace. In talking with Vitra chief executive Rolf Fehlbaum, Mau found that Fehlbaum is interested in the same kinds of questions that he was asking: “Is seniority worth waiting for? What defines a good job?”

So BMD and Vitra are conducting a joint investigation into the culture of the workplace. The next issue of Vitra’s biannual publication, “Workspirit,” is due out this month to coincide with a major furniture trade show in Colon. There are also plans for Web sites, conferences, ad campaigns, and books. “All of the energies of cultural change are coursing through the workplace,” Mau says. “What if Vitra becomes synonymous not only with exceptional design but also with research, speculation, and thinking about [work]?”

Other BMD projects are barreling ahead. The final edit of “Stress” must be finished by the end of the week, and, by Monday, the video equipment will be shipped to Vienna. In two weeks, the firm will present its designs for the Seattle Public Library, and, that same week, it will unveil a model and some sketches of its plan for Downsview Park, in Toronto. Both projects are in partnership with Rem Koolhaas’s firm, the Office for Modern Architecture.

All of that means that most of the 20 full-time employees of Bruce Mau Design will be staying late tonight. Chris Pommer explains why he’ll stick around, even though BMD doesn’t offer the stock options of a Net startup or the higher pay of a commercial firm: “We’re not designing junk mail that will wind up in a landfill. This is stuff that, if we do it right, will last.”

Mau himself never stops thinking about the things that bind his studio together and keep his people energized about doing good work. “Now that I have a family, I see the business in a much more holistic way,” he says. “A big part of why people come here is for the adventure and the journey: It allows them to go down roads that they haven’t been down before.”

Scott Kirsner ([email protected]) is a Fast Company contributing editor.

Sidebar: Changing Identity

Bruce Mau Design has created the visual identity for institutions like the Netherlands Architecture Institute, in Rotterdam, and Indigo, a Canadian chain of book and music stores. For one client, BMD set expiration dates for the signage and other materials, so that the client would be perceived as perpetually fresh. Mau explains the new split personality of corporate identity:

“In the days when designers like Paul Rand were creating logos for IBM and for Westinghouse, corporate identity was about fixing a position. You wanted to communicate stability. In the current climate, you have to engineer two vectors — one of stability and one of change — simultaneously. Madonna is a classic example. She engineers transformations. The person and the music stay pretty stable, but the image changes. And because it changes, you see it again. If she stayed the same, people would move on.

“You can’t stabilize or else you disappear. Companies producing change are the only ones that you see in the marketplace — whether it’s technological change, programmatic change, or territorial change. Corporate identity has to communicate that.”

Sidebar: When to Say No to a Client
Bruce Mau Design Inc. is almost entirely free of regimentation. Its managers do have one system, though, which they use to decide whether to take on a project. “Our work defines who we are, so we like to choose our projects in a considered way,” says Bruce Mau. Below, he describes his “Four Ps” checklist.

People: “Every project boils down to spending time with the client. If its people are good, you can overcome any problem. If they’re bad, every problem will seem twice as big.”

Project: “Is the project adventurous? Would it provide new opportunities for learning?” BMD doesn’t do any marketing, so its body of work attracts new clients. Knowing that, Mau and his team are reluctant to do work in industries or domains that they think are creative dead ends.

Profit: “We need to make money on everything that we do in order to sustain the business, whether it’s a project for an art gallery or a multinational corporation.”

Plate: “How much do we have on our plate?” BMD has only 20 full-time employees, and a tight network of freelancers and contractors. Mau is wary of trying to expand the size of his firm too quickly; he thinks carefully about how new work will affect the group.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2000 issue of Fast Company magazine.

Canadian Bruce Mau, 40, exemplifies a new breed of design auteur. His current book, Life Style, a 627-page manifesto, monograph and virtual museum is, according to New York Times design critic Herbert Muschamp, a ‘strip tease performed with an endless variety of veils.’ The book, he says, ‘tantalises readers with glimpses into the thinking of one of the most creative minds at work in design today.’ But note that the word ‘graphic’ does not appear in this statement. Mau’s career, though rooted in graphic design, has spread into the realms of architecture, film and landscape design, often in equal collaboration with professionals from other spheres, notably the architects Rem Koolhaas, with whom he co-authored the monolithic
S,M,L,XL (see Eye no. 15 vol. 4) and Frank Gehry, for whose Walt Disney Concert Hall he designed the signage and typographic identity.

After periods in the early 1980s with Pentagram in London and Spencer Francey Peters in Toronto, Mau co-founded Public Good, a design practice dedicated to public and non-profit organizations. In 1985 he left to design Zone 1/2, an anthology of writings on the contemporary city, and to set up his own studio, Bruce Mau Design, in Toronto. He subsequently developed the consistent visual identity of Zone books and remains their design director.

At a time when layering, clutter, and distressed typography appeared to rule, Mau wedded Modernist economy to a personal passion for visual eloquence. He has designed identities for the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and, more recently, the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Between 1991 and 1993 he was creative director of I.D. magazine and has worked with the Getty Research Institute on a wide range of publications.
His many collaborative projects have led to work with the artist/composer Gordon Monahan, film-maker Michael Snow and choreographer Meg Stuart. For the Vienna Festival 2000 Bruce Mau Design created, with André Lepecki, STRESS, a multimedia installation about the constructs of the human body. His studio designed another remarkable book published to accompany the exhibition ‘Douglas Gordon • Black Spot’ at Tate Liverpool. Mau also worked with Rem Koolhaas and Petra Blaisse to develop the winning submission for the landscaping of Downsview Park in Toronto (see spreads on p17). From giving visual form to the texts of others, Mau has become a thoughtful commentator on issues of consumption, persuasion and communication. Life Style is the latest vehicle with which he can consider the role of design in politics, culture and art.

Steven Heller: How do you feel about the concept of design authorship?
Bruce Mau: If you take that term apart and look at what it means to be one or the other, you see a configuration that is, in some sense, oppositional. The author, at least mythically, has a kind of contemplative sensibility and responsibility, and is meant to observe and engage in the world and derive from the world some useful substance.
The designer, on the other hand, is constantly producing. And so they’re almost at odds. What we’ve tried to do in the studio is to push design into the production of substance and bring to design practice the techniques of the author.

SH: What are those techniques?
BM: A direct engagement with the world. One of the principal differences between design (as it’s classically defined) and authorship is the degree to which you deal directly with substance. Mostly, design applies to previously filtered material. When we finished S,M,L,XL, I was teaching at Rice University and I wanted to convey to the people I was working with there what we were trying to do. I made a diagram that became quite significant for me. It shows a kind of wave where you move up and down, and you engage with the world. Its amplitude shows our ability to travel into the world freely and to choose objects of our own interest for consideration. That’s what an author is charged with. Typically, the author crystallises the issues and positions, then engages design in the communication of the resulting statement or text.

SH: And what are you doing to bring these different entities together?
BM: We have tried to superimpose design practice on the author’s role, to travel the amplitude, and to engage the world. Now, that presents problems. The reason, I think, that literature has the power that it does is that it has the freedom that it has. And that freedom derives from a disconnection from the demands of production. Designers don’t have that luxury.

SH: So do you just carve away a chunk of time to practice authorship?
BM: I do it by hook or by crook. With my new book I have engineered a situation where I have to produce as an author, so the demands drive the production.

SH: Let’s talk about your book, Life Style. In your introduction you say that few terms have been as savagely commodified and gutted of meaning as the phrase “life style.” So why have you selected this buzz-like title?
BM: I’ve always had a kind of allergy to the idea of style as a practice, and always imagined that there were deeper motivations that might be mobilized. It’s important that these two terms be separated, the idea of “life” and “style” each being a project. If we embrace style as the new outcome of our work, we realize that style becomes a philosophical concept and loses its superficiality. Instead of something ephemeral it becomes a deeply significant idea. Our work is about living a certain way, and those choices constitute a style. The real intersection that constitutes our work is the merging of life and style.

SH: It’s an ambitious goal, to redeem a phrase so associated with the ephemeral.
BM: It will be very interesting to see what happens to the term. But I think it’s actually in some way a land-grab, to take back some terrain that was lost and acknowledge the central place of these apparently insignificant practices in twenty-first century life.

SH: In your book you use the word “we”. Do you always work collaboratively?
BM: The work of the studio is a nest of collaborations. It begins with the collaborations inside the studio. The studio then forms collaborations with people outside of the studio, like Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry, and other artists and designers. The authorship of the book is itself a complex set. It is a collaboration with Kyo Maclear and Bart Testa, its editors, and a design team led by Chris Rowat, and its producer Jim Shedden. I have a situation where, when it comes time to take something like this into the public realm, there is a necessary reduction of complexity. The book is about the studio as a production, and I am responsible for the studio. It’s a complex group of people, producing all sorts of things – and authorship is one of them.

SH: In Life Style you tap social issues. How did you choose the concerns to address and/or attack?
BM: It arose out of a project to understand the direction of our work. In order to know where I wanted to take our work, I needed to be able to articulate the context in which the objects we make are obliged to live. If I can make a general claim for the book’s utility, it’s that we all live in this context, and we all work against this background. In order to have any sense of how things are evolving, we need to understand the evolutionary nature of the context. Marshall McLuhan used this great phrase: “The things that work us over.” The things that are working us over have evolved into a new set of forces. So I wanted to have a sense of what those forces were, and I began to put together an inventory of those conditions. On the one hand, I attack it; but at the same time, I embrace it. I think it is one of the paradoxical conditions of design authorship, that you have to be both producer and critic simultaneously. I can maintain a kind of double life.

SH: Does that imply a degree of hypocrisy?
BM: I don’t think it’s hypocrisy. I think that it’s a necessary condition. The alternatives are: you don’t think or you don’t do. If you are producing image culture then you are part of the problem. Such is life!

SH: There are many different ideas in this book, from attacks on public relations to observations on tourism. But the book is also a portfolio for Bruce Mau Design. Is there a subtext influencing how people should view your work?
BM: It’s not so much of a subtext. For example, if there is an economy of the image, it has new rules and regulations and it creates a new dynamic that we’re just beginning to understand. The book, in a way, uses our studio as a lens through which to look at this issue and to imagine a practice of image-production that is fully engaged.

SH: You use this word “engaged” throughout the book. What do you mean by “engaged”?
BM: It’s the capacity to look at something in a deep way, and to deal with the complexities of a problem and a project, and to deal with the contradictions and the difficulties that are raised. Let’s say that we don’t always achieve it, and we don’t achieve even some of it on everything. But the book is about an effort to achieve it. You accept with a kind of Zen-like approach the conditions you discover.

SH: I have a question about heft. Part of the appeal of S,M,L,XL was its physical form. It’s a veritable building of a book, and that is a bold statement. Life Style is similarly hefty, over 600 pages. Why?
BM: We didn’t set out with a fixed idea of what it would be, and we let the thing evolve. We were fairly tough on what and how much to include. But one of the things I learned from S,M,L,XL, was that we could have done 90 per cent of the work and had ten per cent of the resonance. It comes from pushing something to its conclusion. It’s like pushing it into the kind of form that it needs to be.

SH: Did you have a predetermined limit?
BM: No. The publishers were very open, and they said they wanted me to do the book that I needed to do. I actually expected it to be a little bit bigger. And it became clear that the thing found a nice rhythm.
For me, it’s a compositional issue and finding a kind of resonance, and giving the thing a shape, but also doing something that produces a certain complexity that challenges resolution. It’s not impossible but it’s more difficult to do on a smaller scale.

SH: Did you have a sense of the audience?
BM: I wanted to do something that would be generally useful. Also, I don’t enter most design competitions, so a lot of the work has not been seen in the broader community. More and more of our work is not object-based. Some of our projects are not even visible; for example, certain things that appear in the “Research” section of the book. Some of it has visible substance, but increasingly our work is organisational, conceptual, programming work that may or may not have a visible outcome. Often it’s attached to a visible outcome that evolves eventually. In order to move away from a classical definition of what we do, we needed a certain amount of real estate in the book to establish adjacencies, and that drove a lot of the decision-making. What’s very exciting is to see that design thinking – and the practice of design – can be liberated from the visual without losing its ambition for the visual. For me, the real beauty of a project is all these different things happening alongside one another and producing frictions that can only be caused by that proximity. It’s mostly not in the individual thing but in the space between the things that all the fun happens.

SH: Are you referring to the fourteen short stories that are spread throughout the book?
BM: For me the stories are the most fun things because I loved doing them, and I didn’t know that I could do them. But the stories are, in a way, a very meagre Pointillist image. Only instead of a Seurat, you have, you know, 40 dots on a page. So I had to inject an image into it. It’s in the space between the stories that you understand what’s really happening in the studio. But you also, as a reader, have to imagine it yourself.

SH: Is there an analogy to another medium?
BM: The obvious resonance is cinema.

SH: You use the term “cinematic migration” . . .
BM: By that I mean cinematic technique and thinking becoming part of other practices. I made a collaboration with the film-maker François Girard, who did The Red Violin. Of all the people I showed S,M,L,XL, to, he had the fastest uptake. From the moment I explained it he saw exactly how it was done. He directed Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and he immediately recognized the episodic nature of S,M,L,XL.

SH: A number of books made by graphic designers over the last few years have tried to break out of the traditional linear narrative: Pure Fuel, Tomato’s Process, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist. Did you consciously try to separate yourself from these?
BM: We did look at others, like the Tomato book, and every once in a while we saw things that seemed promising. In the end, though, they were always disappointing. It had to do with the intersection of content and design. They would look like they would be fascinating, and we’d get there, and there’d be no there there!

SH: Another of your recurring themes is what you call a “Global Image Economy.” You say, “we’re doomed to a life of decorating and redecorating in the Global Image Economy.” But you also see the designer as “one who cannot afford to be stable or to look at boundaries as impassable.” How can designers make changes in such a powerful, forceful economy without forsaking their livelihoods?
BM: I should clarify that, because it’s a little out of context. I say that all these things are true if we fail to act. I think that’s the proviso, that the onus is on us to engage with these things and to deal with them. I don’t presume to have a formula for how to do this. I don’t think cheerleading is very helpful, nor do I think conventional resistance is useful in this context.

SH: So you reject the tactics of the anti-branders?
BM: The brands are the least of our problems. The brands are, in a sense, a kind of democratic function of the market. In other words, we know where Coca-Cola lives. It’s the millions of numbered companies that we know nothing about that are most likely to be dumping chemicals into our water supply. It’s not Coca-Cola. The brands are mechanisms by which we hold companies accountable. If every company were branded we would have a more accountable market. So the sort of knee-jerk anti-branding sensibility of Adbusters is not productive. You need a more complex set of responses than that. And the people at Wired who say they’re living a revolution are also at another extreme of the spectrum. We need a middle ground where you acknowledge the complexities of your work and produce simultaneously.

SH: You also talk about “camouflage industries”, the vast industry “devoted to manufacturing appearances that are subtly at odds with reality.” By raising these issues, aren’t you tacitly calling for action?
BM: Yes, I am calling for action, but I am not prescribing action.

SH: So we all have to come up with individual responses?
BM: As the scale of business changes, it’s more and more difficult to find a pure thing. So we need something else. And I think that something else is what we call an ‘engaged practice.’ It means having some kind of locator that places you in context to these things, and that locator is the ability to look at what’s happening and to understand its implications.
The real locator is engagement. It’s only through the kind of abstraction that has become design practice that we allow ourselves to disconnect from the implications of our work. What I am saying is, “Let’s put the implications back together with the work.”

SH: In the first section the juxtapositions of images suggest that you are more or less siding with the Adbusters approach. Not necessarily the specific activity, but the general sensibility. And when you talk about engagement, it is about taking responsibility. How one takes that responsibility is the question. But in the beginning of the book, which then leads into how you have practised your life’s work, you’re calling for an overthrow specifically of “camouflage industries”, “ideas of surveillance”, of violence that occurs in the culture. The reader of the book may want to know more. Are there any prescriptions?
BM: No. I think that people need to produce those for themselves. There’s no set formula.

SH: The “Freeway Condition” section states: “With culture set at cruise-control, clarity trumps complexity. Known quantity Toys-R-Us wins out every time over enterprising but ambiguous mom-and-pop stores. Uniqueness becomes a traffic hazard.” I like that notion. But I’m interested in the image that you selected to illustrate that particular statement: an old VW. Will you explain?
BM: I am reminded of that line sometimes a cigar . . . But I won’t hide behind that. That was simply such a great image of stopping.

SH: Throughout the book you sound cautionary notes like “Don’t follow the conformist view.” You then show your own work, which presumably hasn’t followed the conformist view. Is this intended as a counterpoint to what you are criticizing, or a reminder to yourself to remain vigilant?
BM: I like to do work that has real substance and significance. And to do this you have to understand it conceptually, otherwise you are designing for an era that has passed. In order to understand what’s going on you have to understand the context as it evolves. That helps to direct the work. But it’s not a matter of saying, you know, “Four legs bad and two legs good.” You can see a concept that has so inserted itself into the way we live that it’s hard to even recognize it as a presence. And yet it remaps everything in the world according to its methods. And that remapping is part of our own work. Because we’re either remapping unconsciously according to the message, or we’re conscious of travelling with it or against it.

SH: You use the phrase “A lot of density” to describe new media. Is this your way to describe our dependence on virtual reality as a distraction from hard truths?
BM: It’s a suggestion that we have, in a way, liberated ourselves from certain dependencies, and that contrary to a lot of free-floating anxiety about the issue, almost the inverse of what we would imagine turns out to be the case. That the more a thing is reproduced and circulated, the more the original gains in significance. [Walter] Benjamin predicted that it would deplete the original of its significance, but in fact the opposite has come to pass. There isn’t an artist alive today who doesn’t want to be reproduced.
SH: What was your purpose in writing “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth”? Is it your first or last will and testament, or a self-help manual?
BM: I did it because my wife’s sister was hounding me for a contribution to a magazine she was doing! But [the manifesto] really emerges out of the process of the work, as a way of saying, “This is what we do.” And it had a very strange resonance that I’d never expected. I published a short version of it in my sister-in-law’s magazine in Toronto, then when I went to a conference in Amsterdam, ‘Doors of Perception,’ I presented a longer version. There was an incredibly positive response and several requests to publish it, and it’s since been published in dozens of languages. But again, it’s part of a complex, kind of fractal portrait of the studio and of the practice.

SH: You talk constantly about the studio. But isn’t the work really YOU?
BM: Well, I’m part of the work. But the work happens in a very complex set of relationships. The studio has a boundary that is permeable; some people are inside, some people in the thickness of the boundary, and some people are outside – and they’re constantly moving in and through it. So my role is somehow to facilitate that movement and the production inside and outside and through it. I wrote the manifesto out of the experience of the studio. In other words, as much as I produce the studio, the studio produces me.

SH: When you write about the studio as an entity, you talk about inventing a voice. But you are the front man. So how do you balance the needs of the individual against those of the collective?
BM: We need both simultaneously. I have my own experience, I have my own direction, I have my own intentions and my own voice. A good friend pointed out that you can’t produce authorship as a collective: somebody has to have a singular voice. So I need to do that. But I can also produce a collective entity, and that entity can produce any number of singular voices, and can give voice to any number of ideas. One of the most rewarding things about the studio is to see real voices emerging. I designed the studio in such a way that the people in it have a full experience of the work, that they themselves have an engagement in the way that I did when I first started the studio, working myself. That’s the way for it to produce character.

SH: What next, now that your book is published? Do you have any anxieties about the future?
BM: Yes. Actually I made a little diagram. We did a competition, a 322-acre park in Toronto – it’s in the book. It was a competition with Rem Koolhaas and Petra Blaisse. We just never imagined that we would win . . . and we won.
So I woke up the other day and I realised, ‘My God, I’ve become a landscape architect!’ I was saying to one of the people in the studio that our ideal is to have the status of the artist, the schedule of the author, the paycheque of the businessman, the complexities of the landscape architect, and the anxieties of the designer – namely not very many. Instead, I ended up instead with the paycheque of the artist, the anxieties of the author, the complexities of the businessman, the schedule of the designer, and the status of the landscape architect!