massive claim:
bruce mau on the future of design culture
by James Culham
commissioned by the cbc (canadian broadcasting corporation) edited version and images - click here
Massive Claim: Bruce Mau on Design Culture Preview of Toronto-based designer's upcoming book and exhibition "Massive Change: An International Project on the Future of Design Culture" at the Vancouver Art Gallery
You may not have heard of him yet, but Bruce Mau is considered by many to be one of Canada's great thinkers. Based in a large warehouse studio on Spadina Avenue in Toronto Bruce Mau Design's 43 employee design practice has developed a reputation as an influential player in the international design and art worlds. BMD has collaborated on several projects with some of the star architects of our time such as Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry and managed the communications efforts of key art world institutions such as Gagosian Gallery in New York and The Art Gallery of Ontario.
But if he began his career as graphic designer to the stars, Bruce Mau is fast becoming a design star in his own right, expanding the boundaries of the discipline for other graphic designers as he re-envisions his own role. Even graphic designers working on high profile advertising and communications campaigns typically toil in anonymity. "Photo-shop until you drop" is the paraphrased job description and career path for the majority. Bruce Mau's emergence from design-ghetto obscurity began in 1995 when he co-authored, with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, "S,M,L,XL", which was to become a sort of bible for designers and architects. Among other distinctions, the 1300 page brick of a book is the first in which the book designer shares equal billing with its author as co-creator.
But it was in 2000 that Mau's career really took off, with another large scale design book called "Life Style", released on his 40th birthday, which examines our image-obsessed culture. Rather like a magician giving away his tricks, in "Life Style" Mau sheds light on the ways that we engage with advertising and other visual culture and cautions that those who spend their days manipulating images and text are also manipulating us.
It was about this time that Mau dropped the word "graphic" from his business card - and began to be obsessed with the definition of the word "design" and role of the designer in creating our world. Outside of the traditional boundaries of a graphic design firm, the studio is currently master planning "Tree City" a new national park on the site of the former Downsview Armed Forces base in Toronto and collaborating, again with Frank Gehry, on the development of a Museum of Bio-Diversity in Panama City.
BMD is still producing graphic design work as well, such as the typography at the recently opened Frank Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, presented in custom typeface - "A Font Called Frank". Other commercial clients include Indigo Books and Dufflet Pastries in Toronto. In the spring of 2004 BMD's graphic work for the Rem Koolhaas designed Seattle Public Library, will be unveiled. Among other typographical innovations will be an enormous, block long sign built into a sloped sidewalk announcing the building in bold lettering.
Mau is a big man who is not afraid of tackling big ideas and seems drawn to working in large scale. We meet at the Vancouver Art Gallery in late October where Mau is making preparations for what is perhaps his studio's most ambitious project to date, an exhibition and book, both called "Massive Change: An International Project on the Future of Design Culture". Beginning in June of 2004, the exhibition will occupy all of two floors of the gallery - the summer blockbuster event - a risky undertaking at a time of the year when most large art institutions opt for traditional, if predictable, crowd-pleasing shows such as French Impressionists or Modern Masters like Picasso or Matisse. The exhibition is partly a project of "The Institute Without Boundaries" - BMD's in-house school currently consisting of seven students, affiliated with George Brown College in Toronto.
"Massive Change" is, in a sense, a massive claim - particularly given that many designers sense their impending obsolesence in an age of increasingly ubiquitous and sophisticated software. If design was once a sub-set of business, culture and nature respectively - now, Mau asserts, design has come to envelop all things. But he is not interested in the narrow definition and typical perception of design such as the latest tea kettle, chair or fashions. "Design is such a defined term already that has to do with really superficial colour, minor invention, material, funky form and that's what we think." Mau explains. "So, for Massive Change we've taken those usual preoccupations off the table and focus instead on capacity".
Examples of such diverse endeavours as the manipulation of human genetic code, developing new modes of mass transportation, genetically engineering a featherless chicken which can survive in very hot climates, treating disease with genetically modified rice and potatoes and the enormous "Three Gorges Dam" project in China are used to illustrate the new preponderance of design. Leaving aside the fact that it will be news to the aforementioned scientists and engineers that they are now designers, Mau makes a convincing case that we are living in a time of massive change in design culture. It is tempting to drop preconceived notions, suspend disbelief and fall in line with Mau's radical redefinition of the discipline.
As explained on the website, www.massivechange.com: "Design - the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes - has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected. Nature is no longer a realm outside of our manipulation. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves, now that we can do anything, what will we do?"
It is easy to be skeptical about just how "massive" the change has been or is likely to be in the years ahead. Many of the great design-related promises of recent decades - space travel, electric cars, supersonic jet travel, online shopping, the paperless office and on and on - have either been abandoned or expectations have been dramatically reduced. The world, it would seem, is a very conservative client. But Massive Change isn't interested in promoting a specific future. It is however concerned with, as one of Mau's oft-cited influences Marshall McLuhan said, "predicting the present". - focusing attention on the problems and potential solutions that exist today.
As Mau posits, our present capacity has "produced an entirely new set of possibilities on the one hand, but it also demands a new responsibility and a new ethic that we really haven't had to deal with yet".
James Culham
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