A world of change

Toronto —  “It’s not about the world of design. It’s about the design of the world.”

Fourteen words. Two sentences. One of many advertising slogans tacked up on a big, white bulletin board at Bruce Mau Design Inc. But the brief message says it all about “Massive Change” -- an international traveling exhibition about the power and promise of design, opening Oct. 2 at the Vancouver Art Gallery -- and the creative force behind it.

The show offers a global view of technical possibilities and ethical dilemmas facing today’s designers, effectively posing the question: Now that we can do anything, what will we do? It’s the latest project of Canadian Bruce Mau, an expansive thinker who launched himself as a graphic designer and evolved into a go-to guy for architects, artists, writers, academics, urban planners, product developers and entrepreneurs.

“My role is to make things and be problematic,” says Mau, 44, who is making his first foray into the curatorial field after designing the typeface for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, spearheading a transformation of Toronto’s Downsview Park, planning a museum of biodiversity in Panama City with architect Frank Gehry and creating “STRESS,” a video installation about the limits of the human body that has traveled to Vienna, Lisbon and Rotterdam, Netherlands.

“How he thinks is what makes him special,” Gehry says. “He’s a thinking man’s designer. He goes beyond the limits of the visual, incorporating the whole gestalt of what we are involved with in our lives, and that enriches the design problem. I love working with him.”

The son of a miner, Mau studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto and patched together the beginnings of a career before finding his direction as the designer of Zone, a series of cultural journals known for blending form and content. He’s a big man with an open face, warm brown eyes, curly hair and an air of humility born of the belief that he is lucky to be able to follow his passion. His casual demeanor and easy smile belie the intensity of his conviction that design can save the world.

Comfortably dressed in a black shirt, tan trousers and white running shoes, he presides over a hive of activity on the fifth floor of an old brick building where bicycles are parked by the receptionist’s desk and the only interior walls are plywood bookshelves and bins of art supplies. On a typical day, about 45 young designers hunker down at simple wood tables equipped with computers and strewn with books and papers.

“The thing that almost everyone is looking for, when they work with us, is clarity,” Mau says of the studio, established in 1985. “People most often don’t use that word, but in essence what they are looking for is to be a destination in a noisy world, to be recognized, to be pulled out of the background, and that means clarity.”

And that’s what they get, says Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan, who invited Mau to help him plan an expansion, renovation and new identity for the UCLA Hammer Museum. “Bruce has a way of tapping into the most essential issue or possibility for a given design problem. When he hits that core, it allows clients to see themselves with a lucidity that is startling. At the same time, he creates a context with all sorts of things spinning off it.”

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Convention defied

As might be expected, “Massive Change” is not a standard design show of objects lined up in galleries. Filling 20,000 square feet of display space on two floors with a series of environments that incorporate video, sound, still photography and images from computers and satellites -- as well as products such as recyclable chairs, self-cleaning glass, genetically modified rice and self-healing plastic -- the exhibition epitomizes the vision of a designer who looks for simplicity in a mass of details.

Walking around the bare-bones conference room of his studio, where models of the show sit on large tables with sawhorse legs, Mau launches into an account of the exhibition’s evolution. It began about three years ago when Kathleen Bartels resigned as assistant director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and became director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Determined to upgrade the exhibition program and add a strong component of architecture and design, she immediately thought of Mau, whose 624-page manifesto on contemporary design, “Life Style,” had made a big splash in cultural circles.

Bartels and the gallery’s senior curator, Bruce Grenville, thought the Vancouver museum needed a manifesto of its own, in the form of an exhibition that would declare a serious commitment to design. “We were captivated by some of the statements in ‘Life Style’ about the changing nature of design,” Grenville says. “We wanted to see if he could show how change is occurring and how it works on a global level.”

Grenville called Mau and suggested that he organize an exhibition on the future of design. Hesitant at first, Mau thought the subject was far too vast. But the timing was propitious and he began to think about turning the proposal into an even bigger project.

At the request of George Brown-Toronto City College, he was dreaming up an adventurous design program, the Institute Without Boundaries. The goal was to create a new breed of multifaceted designers who would spend a year at his studio, working as a team to research, design and realize a public project. The exhibition, Mau thought, might be an ideal project for the first two groups of students.

“The institute operates like the studio,” he says. “We take on projects that we don’t know how to do and we grapple with them. We know that we don’t know, but we know that we have a method for learning and understanding and trying to do something new in the gap between knowing and not knowing.”

For “Massive Change,” Mau drew upon studio research that had captured his attention because it contradicted prevailing notions of gloom and doom. He started making notes on a plane ride to Los Angeles and quickly conceptualized a project that would scrutinize global patterns of positive change. Upon his return to Toronto he came across a speech by former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, delivered in 1957 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Mau focused on a quote from historian Arnold Toynbee: “The 20th century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.”

“When I read that,” Mau says, “I thought, ‘That’s what “Massive Change” is about.’ If you take away disciplinary differences and just look at what designers are doing, there is a common denominator. It goes back to Toynbee’s formulation that people are trying to improve things, one way or another. So I went to Vancouver and said, ‘Here’s what I think this project is about.’ ”

The concept was “a little more daunting than we expected,” Grenville says, “a little more of a challenge.” But the gallery accepted Mau’s proposal and the work began.

“If Toynbee was right, there had to be a mountain of evidence,” says Mau, who devised a thematic framework of 10 “design economies” or “systems of exchange in which design is a driver” instead of relying on traditional categories for the exhibition. “Instead of looking at architecture, which is all about the singular,” he says, “we looked at the urban economy, which is all about the plural. Instead of looking at industrial design, we looked at the economy of movement.

“We didn’t want this to be futuristic,” Mau says. “We wanted it to be about the future that is happening right now.” Another guiding principle was to let the look of the show grow out of the content. “That’s the core constant of our work,” he says. “It’s not stylistically driven. You couldn’t possibly bring to your work the complexity that the world brings to it. All you need to do is just be open to it. What we want to talk about in this project is design that has a potential for changing the world.”

During the first year, eight students worked on the project with institute director Greg van Alstyne. At the end of the term, two students stayed on at the studio to coordinate the exhibition and an accompanying book and 10 new students arrived. Much of their time has been spent doing research, compiling 100 examples of positive design developments in each of the exhibition’s “economies” and charting patterns of change.

Visitors will enter the exhibition through an orientation gallery and pass through segments on urban design, movement, information, energy, images, markets, materials, military technology, manufacturing and living. The final gallery will sum up global wealth in an installation of silver balloons inflated to different degrees, reflecting relative expenditures on such things as education, health, energy and the environment.

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Perspective options

“It’s designed so that if you just walk through it, you get it,” Mau says of the show. “Or you can tunnel into it as far as you want.” Tunnelers can spend a lot of time looking at portraits of the Earth that document the ozone hole, Internet communication, atmospheric changes and space debris; watching videos about innovations in developing markets; perusing images captured by a wide array of devices; and examining new materials such as Aerogel, said to be the world’s lightest solid.

“We know that there isn’t a big effort to abandon mobility,” Mau says, shifting his attention to a model of the “Movement” gallery. “While the world may not have embraced secular democracy, it has embraced traffic. It has embraced freedom of movement. That means we have to do it better, with less resources and less impact. And we found that it’s being worked on everywhere, from the big guys to the independents.”

Among examples in the exhibition are the stair-climbing iBOT wheelchair, designed by Dean Kamen; the three-wheeled Gizmo Neighborhood Electric Vehicle; and the human-hybrid Twike, powered by electricity or muscles.

“This is my first exhibition,” Mau says. “But for me, the project is the project, not the exhibition. The project is massive change and our grappling with it in the exhibition, the book, the website, a local radio show, public programs, the whole thing. That’s what’s exciting, and it works as a kind of ecology of information.”

Scheduled to run through Jan. 3 in Vancouver, then travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the show is expected to make three stops in Europe and wind up in New York, but the itinerary is in the works. “Massive Change” does not have a Los Angeles venue, but San Francisco is a possibility, Bartels says.

Wherever the exhibition goes, Mau will be watching. “If people walk around the show and say, ‘Cool,’ that is not a good outcome,” he says. “If they say, ‘I want to do something, I want to know more about these people and their work,’ that’s a good outcome. We want people to change what they do. They don’t have to sell their cars. They do have to realize that there’s a huge movement going on and that they are probably already part of it.”

He won’t be surprised if the show is interpreted as a validation of globalism. Arguing against that movement is “an absurdity,” he says, “and an abandonment of the people we most want to support. What I worry about is, if we don’t do things like this that articulate and consolidate the gains that have been made, it’s much easier to lose them. That, for me, is the most pressing political agenda. Let’s understand what we have achieved.”