Making a Map to a New World

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.