Designer of Today: Bruce Mau

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.

Bruce Mau

You can begin your professional life intending on one career – say, as a schoolteacher – and use those skills to walk a diverse career path: author, keynote speaker, counsellor. Actually, one schoolteacher – Sting – ended up as the lead singer in a famous pop band and later became an actor, multi-instrumentalist and writer. So it goes with many careers – people start out as one thing and build on that or take their acquired skills on to ventures new.

This is not to say it’s a bad thing to stay put in one career – after all, Doré and Escher did and they achieved the utmost sublimity (see my earlier posts on them). But for others, branching out from one career enriches their own needs and impacts our world on many levels.

A number of creatives build on what they begin and Canadian designer Bruce Mau (1959-) is no exception. He studied in Toronto’s Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) before working in the field of graphic design and eventually moving on to architecture, film and conceptual philosophy. His early work was in advertising, working at Toronto’s Fifty Fingers design firm and the U.K.’s Pentagram in London. It was in London during the Thatcher years that Mau woke up to design in the fields of political issues, as well as how interdisciplinary art forms could interact, with designers venturing into writing, film and other areas to merge parity, societal and literary endeavours. Mau realized the possibilities for his art were boundless. He had a taste for unconventional practices and processes and began to think about how to implement his design concepts independently.

The famous Zone books illustrate graphic components such as highly colour-saturated landscapes with textured images and outstanding displays of typography mixed with voids of white space that, in the 1980s, were innovative and enhanced the effect of the message.

Mau founded several companies: Public Good Design and Communications when he returned to Canada from the U.K., and later Bruce Mau Design (BMD), and the Institute without Boundaries. Whilst at BMD in the 1980s, he worked on a large compendium on critical thinking about urbanism. Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City became one of his most notable works and featured philosophers such as Paul Virilio and architects like Rem Koolhaas. The Village Voice review of this book tells us that Mau aimed “to do an object that wasn't an illustration of the content, but a model—something that performed and behaved like the city itself. As if you're holding the city in your hands and experiencing the city through the book over time.”

Mau continued to work on Zone books, including Zone 3/4/5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, until 2004. Mau also produced work for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Andy Warhol Museum and at the same time became a lecturer and thesis advisor in such notable facilities as the University of Toronto, the California Institute of the Arts and the Wexner Center of Columbus.

An honorary fellow of the Ontario College of Art & Design and member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Mau has received awards such as the Toronto Arts Award for Architecture and Design (1999), the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation (1998) and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2001).

In the late1990s, Mau wrote An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth that advises designers and other artists on how to remain inventive and be the best they can be. A couple of my favourite tips are:

“Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.”  

A beautiful way to encourage daring and banish fear.

And

“Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.” 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Mau…for reminding me that it’s okay to use pen and paper!

Trivia Break

In 2006, Mau was involved in the interactive Stock Exchange of Visions, a travelling installation which arranged for thinkers from diverse fields and nationalities to come together to provide insight into their vision for the future of our planet, each building on each other’s ideas. The installation has moved along to various cities.

Currently Mau’s company is The Massive Change Network, a joint venture with his wife Bisi Williams. The idea behind “Massive Change” was to interview 100 artists, thinkers, craftspeople, technicians and even simply laypeople not involved in arts or engineering at all. Mau believes all of us are designers whether we realize it or not, and that everyone is taking on more responsibilities in more areas of work and therefore involved changing the world.

“They're all designers according to us,” Mau says. “Some of them didn't think they were designers, but they use the word 'design' more intelligently, colloquially, than we do as designers ourselves.” With work transcending traditional professional boundaries, “they just blew all those categories away,” he continues. The outcome is “design simply as a critical methodology for solving problems.”

Bruce Mau’s monograph, Life Style, was published in the year 2000, the start of the new millennium.