Alexander Gill reviews Mau's Revolution: Massive Change
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VANCOUVER -- When Bruce Mau's critics suggest he bit off more than he could chew with Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, he tells them they're right.

"It's been delicious," chuckles the designer, who was at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday morning to lead media on a preview through one of the most ambitious design exhibits Canada has ever seen.

Opening to the public today, Massive Change certainly is massive. It fills 20,000 square feet of space over two floors. Visitors are guided through a series of what Mau calls "economies" or systems of exchange -- urban, information, energy, material, manufacturing and others -- in which design supposedly drives the way we live.

What distinguishes Massive Change from most run-of-the mill design shows is its sociopolitical objective. Mau isn't interested in showcasing nifty objects. He's out to show the world there is a revolution going on in North American design that "dares to imagine the welfare of the entire human race" and has the potential to change the world for the greater good. He is, of course, embracing design by its broadest possible definition.

"Massive change is not about the world of design; it's about the design of the world," the exhibit's manifesto trumpets.

Mau, wearing his trademark black pants, shirt and white sneakers, is awfully gracious with this group of journalists, considering what's written on the first wall of text in the entrance lobby: "Perhaps the most startling discovery in the research is the degree to which the story of Massive Change remains untold, how the media, with its mind-numbing insistence on crisis and disasters, somehow ignored one of the most extraordinary stories in human history.

"So what is this story? And how did Mau -- a 44-year-old Toronto designer who launched his career as the graphic artist who designed Zone, a series of cultural journals that blended form and content -- end up in Vancouver to spread the gospel of this so-called revolution?

Innovative typography might have been his earlier signature, but Mau quickly earned a reputation as a big-picture problem-solver for a vast range of clients that include art dealers, writers, academics, urban planners, product developers, entrepreneurs and superstar architects such as Cesar Pelli and Frank Gehry, the latter of which he is now working with on a biodiversity museum in Panama City.

In 1995, Mau collaborated with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas on S, M, L, XL, a 1,344-page polemic described on the back cover as "a free fall in the space of typographic imagination." Five years later, he published his own manifesto, Life Style, a collage of his work and ideas on subjects as diverse as management and creative leadership.

Kathleen Bartels, the director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, had met Mau several times when she was assistant director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She was intrigued by his ideas about the changing nature of design. But it wasn't until 2000, when she was lured away to Vancouver, that she realized he was Canadian. Determined to reposition the gallery as a world leader in contemporary art, and augment its exhibition program with a strong component of architecture and design, she and senior curator Bruce Grenville asked Mau if he would be interested in creating an exhibit on the future of design.

"It's too big a project," Mau recalls thinking. "The scale is too demanding. Trying to understand all the complexities of the world is too challenging."

Yet when he looked around, Mau saw something even more troubling. "There's a very negative mood out there. People think things are getting worse. What we [at Bruce Mau Design] saw, was that things were getting better." Beyond the prevailing pessimism, Mau kept seeing extraordinary projects that were changing the world for the greater good.

Around the same time, Mau had been approached by Toronto's George Brown College to help found a postgraduate program in design that would bring a group of students into his studio to work on a real project. The aim was to create a new breed of designer, one that would be part artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

"I couldn't imagine a better fit," says Mau. The Institute Without Boundaries, a joint project of Bruce Mau Design and George Brown College, is now in its second year. The first two groups of grads were responsible for researching, detailing and articulating a future for design, or the core of this exhibit.

One of the important discoveries they made in the early days of their research was a statement made by English historian Arnold Toynbee, which Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson quoted when making his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize for Peace in 1957. "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," Toynbee wrote in A Study of History.

"That's the pattern we're seeing now," says Mau. "When you take away all the differences -- the horizontal fields that separate the disciplines of design -- and connect them all, this is what's happening. And when you use the phrase 'practical objective,' it shifts the objective of the welfare of the human race from a utopian ideal to a design project."

Each "economy," or section in the exhibit, asserts a singular ambition: "We will provide food and health worldwide," for example. Or "We will design intelligence into material, and liberate form from matter."

When visitors walk through, they encounter interactive displays of techniques or products that are already working toward these ambitions. There are Mercedes-Benz car seats made from coconut shells, wide-screen videos of mobile housing being built in factories, original prototypes of the stair-jumping iBot wheelchair, blue electroluminescent signs that utilize efficient energy sources, rooms entirely covered (floor included) in still photography to demonstrate the power of images, and curtains of pizza boxes to illustrate our unnecessary waste.

Some of the methods, products and practices on display will likely generate heated debate. Mau certainly hopes so. In the "living economy," there is a voting booth next to a stuffed, featherless chicken in a glass display that asks you to vote on whether you think genetic modification of crops and animals is a good thing.

The naked chicken, a crossbreed of feathered birds with balding ones, was developed for poultry farms in tropical zones of the developing world where the birds were losing body mass on account of the heat.

"It's not any different than animal husbandry we use for breeding dogs," says Mau. "Is it wrong?"There is certainly much to chew on here, including the last biting question the exhibit poses: "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

Massive Change: The Future of Global Design continues at the Vancouver Art Gallery to Jan. 3.