Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are Mau MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work and, with co-author, Julio Ottino, dean of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World – The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in the Chicago area.
"I'm very, very concerned that we are already in a time of being lost, that a lot of people feel lost, and they feel like the world has kind of moved out from under them, and that they have lost their bearings. They've lost their anchor, and they don't have what it takes to actually navigate.
And in that kind of environment, it's a very rich environment for fascism and for the worst kind of political movement, for the worst kind of political actors to take advantage of that feeling of powerlessness and fear and disconnection. Design is a methodology that is an empowering methodology within a condition of being unmoored.
So when you don't know what to do, design is a methodology of figuring out what to do, and it's why we're doing a project that we call Massive Action, which is to really give people the tools of empowerment to give them the power to design their life because over the coming couple of decades people are going to see a level of turmoil and change that has not happened in human history. The foundation of any culture is energy, and we have to change fundamentally our source of energy, which is going to change everything else. And I really worry that it's going to be a time – and we're already seeing it - it's going to be a time where the forces of autocracy and totalitarianism and fascism will find fertile ground if we don't actually help people navigate those conditions."
Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network
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