WORK ON WHAT YOU LOVE
A Creative Conversation with Bruce Mau, designer, educator, author, artist, conceptual philosopher and fact-based optimist.
Introduction
Bruce Mau’s work first came to my attention in the late 1990’s via his groundbreaking design for the book ‘S,M,L,XL’ — a collaboration with the renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. At the time I was working in London with Fitch, a multidisciplinary design agency. As a graphic designer at Fitch I worked in teams alongside architects, environmental designers, digital designers and product designers, on large scale brand experience projects for a diverse range of international clients. It was the first time I’d experienced working in a multidisciplinary environment and I found it highly inspiring. The cross-pollination of these disciplines led me to become increasingly curious about the possibilities of design outside of graphic design alone. Alongside this I also became more and more fascinated by the idea of the designer as a creator of content rather than simply the converger of it. As such Bruce Mau’s own unique approach to both these areas of interest naturally caught my attention and I soon became a huge fan of his work.
Having finally met Bruce and his wife Aiyemobisi “Bisi” Williams in person at the What Design Can Do event in Amsterdam in 2017, it was great to finally be able to catch up with him again via Zoom for this inspiring creative conversation.
Questions
Graham Sturt (GS): You must have been interviewed many times. What’s a question everyone asks you, are you bored of being asked it, and do you have a stock answer prepared for it?
Bruce Mau (BM): Well, you know, I think the question isn’t always the same. They don’t ask it in the same way, let’s say. But they are almost always asking about one thing, which is: “How do you get from here to there?”
What I realised is that, when I give lectures or presentations, the question that comes up always in a few different ways is, “How do I get to do this? How do I get to work on what I love?” That is the big question. And it’s never boring because it is always interesting to kind of figure out where it’s coming from. Because the distance between what they are doing and what they want to do is different in every case. And I think it is one of the 24 Design Principles of MC24, and I wasn’t actually sure that it kind of qualified as a principle. Because I thought, maybe it is too soft, or too kind of mushy, but I realised over time that it’s maybe the most important question of all, “How do we connect our passion? How do we connect what we love with what we do?”
And I think it’s why people are so interested in that work. They want to know or figure out how to do this. And the truth is that you never fully arrive there. You’re constantly arriving at that solution. I think partly because what you love is obviously growing and shifting, but also because it’s never quite what you imagined. Like you think you are going to love it and you get there and it is not that level after all. So I think really the question is, “How do you work on what you love?”
GS: Is there a question which is never asked, which you think should be?
BM: I don’t know the answer to that. What I found is that the world is weirder than I can imagine and so the questions keep coming. And the problems keep coming. And the problems keep getting more complex and challenging and diverse.
And for me, I have been very, very fortunate. And I consider myself one of the most fortunate designers of the last century. And part of that good fortune has been very strange questions of people asking me to do things that I had no idea how to do. And I think that has been… it has created such a wonderful life, such an amazing life of growth, of learning and I mean… I think about… like, I once did a short essay on one of the Incomplete Manifesto points, which is: “STUDY.” And I think of the studio as a place of study. And we had this incredible opportunity to study things that we didn’t even know were problems, often. And so that concept of studying — we studied art with Claes Oldenburg and architecture with Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry. You know, we just had such an amazing education.
GS: Something that comes back time and time again in many of the articles I read about you is that you describe yourself as a fact-based optimist. You also believe there’s no better time to be alive. Considering you’ve devoted your career to creating positive change in the world through design, how do you remain positive amid such challenging times?
BM: Well, I talk about fact-based optimism because of what I see. Actually, what I see is that so often we focus on the negative that we only see the negative and don’t see the positive. So we don’t actually understand what is going on. I mean, most people have no concept of where we are in history, partly because we have a human tendency to project our experience backward and forward. We think, well it was always more or less like this and it’s always going to be more or less like this. No, actually. Things were not like this for most of history.
I was born the son of a miner and for most of history, I would have been a miner too. That was how it worked. But I didn’t have to be a miner. The world opened up to me. I mean, we were very poor. We didn’t have running water in our house in the wintertime. I grew up on a farm in a remote community. So, understanding actually what is going on historically and really understanding the difference between today and most of history. Most of history, if you had landed in a country, they killed you. Like, you showed up, and they killed you! It wasn’t like today where you expect that you are going to get off the plane and plug in your computer and everything is going to work.
It is just the most amazing time in history for most people and for more and more people. And that is really important to understand. That it is not only the top billion people, but more and more of the entire population have greater and greater access to the kind of possibilities of a modern world. And that means education, that means technology, it means access, it means mobility, social mobility, cultural mobility, physical mobility.
If you really look at the big picture, there are lots of little things that are problematic. And by little I don’t mean little. I mean, little things can be a pandemic, for instance. The pandemic is a short-term problem. It doesn’t change the long-term trend. The long-term trend is incredibly positive, the short-term pandemic is incredibly negative. But we shouldn’t be blinded by that. And I think it is a very important responsibility of a designer; we have a responsibility to be optimistic. And I like to say that we don’t have the luxury of cynicism. Cynicism is easy. I mean, you can be an idiot and be cynical. To really be optimistic and positive, under duress, in a crisis, takes work. And that work is the work of a designer.
GS: In my research, I saw you variously described as a graphic designer and architect, an artist, filmmaker, eco-environmental designer, and my favourite one, conceptual philosopher. That’s an impressive and diverse range of skills. When you first started your career in design, did you have the ambition to develop your creative talent across so many disciplines?
BM: Well, it is important to acknowledge that I wasn’t educated. I only went to college for about a year and a half. And so I didn’t know what the disciplines were. And I still don’t!
The reality is that I am never quite sure where a graphic designer stops and something else starts. And I just didn’t care about it. I just followed my curiosity and my mind where I wanted to go. And I didn’t regulate it in that way. I wasn’t trying to be offensive or trying to transgress, I was just following the work and following the ideas and following the possibilities.
I like to start with the problem, not the solution. Almost always clients can’t actually describe the problem; they describe it as a solution. They say, “I need a logo, or I need a building.” But when you actually do the work and start the process of really exploring it, often the logo is not the problem. The kind of brand idea is a problem, or the culture is a problem, or the context is the problem. So actually, thinking about it in that way, I just followed the work.
GS: It’s interesting you attended art college for only a year and a half. In a way this probably allowed you to not become pigeon-holed. In contrast I followed a formal design education and came out of university specifically prepared to become a graphic designer. And that’s what I was for quite a few years until I became a Creative Director and things started to open up in a more multidisciplinary way.
If you hadn’t pursued a career in design, what career do you think you would have followed?
BM: Well, I was very nearly a scientist. In fact, I couldn’t get into art school when I decided I wanted to go. It was late, it was basically at the end of my high school career and I had taken almost exclusively math and science. I was a total nerd. I had a job in the school as the chemistry lab technician.
I took care of the chemistry lab and prepared all the experiments and did all that kind of stuff. I was really super into it. Physics, chemistry, biology. I loved that. And I was intending to go into electronics, actually.
And then right at the last minute, it was one of those things where I was in the lab and I’d built a radio. And I just had this kind of feeling that I really didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to do this for my life’s work. So I went down to the guidance office and said, “I want to go to art school.” And they said, “It’s too late — you haven’t applied to art school. Unless you have something we don’t know about, you haven’t taken any art classes. You need a portfolio to get into art school.” And I said, “I’m only sixteen years old, it can’t be too late, there must be other people who have this problem. I can’t imagine that it’s over for me!” And they said, “Well, you could go to this other school. You have to go and talk to this man. He runs a program, but you would have to stay an extra year in high school and you would only do art. Then you can apply to art school from there.”
So I went to meet him, he was a guy named Jack Smith. And he really changed my life. I mean, he was one of the most amazing people that I’ve had the pleasure working with. And he taught everything. It was just an amazing program in this high school in Northern Canada. We did printmaking and ceramics and drawing and painting and typography and photography. I was doing full colour photography, processing my own negatives and prints, doing the colour separations and printing full-colour work on a one-colour Heidelberg press that I had refurbished in high school. And he taught me how to do all of that. I fell in love and it was the best year of my life. It was like everything else just fell away. It’s like okay, this is what I love. I loved putting words and images together and it turned out that’s what people call graphic design. And so that was it really, the alternative was science. And today science and art are still the two big areas of my research. And if you think about what we do as designers, we live in that Venn diagram of art and science.
GS: You said that Jack Smith changed your life. It sounds like he brought out your passion for design and was an inspirational figure for you. Did you remain in contact with him?
BM: Oh yes. I didn’t realise how crafty and brilliant he was as a teacher. He was 65, it was his last year of teaching. And he saw in me something that I didn’t know was there. But he had a brilliant way of teaching, which was, he would complain constantly about me. That I was always kind of pushing the envelope. And he used to say, “Champagne tastes on a beer salary.” And he was always complaining that my things were too elaborate, too grandiose which turned out to be pretty accurate. So he would push against me so I had to work to achieve things. But when he went home at night he would leave the door of the studio open. It was that kind of thing. It was like, “Oh, I can get in here.”
GS: So the crafty, or cunning, thing about him was that actually he had a plan for you?
BM: He was very crafty. I mean, I didn’t know it at the time, but over time when I began teaching I realised this guy was really slick. He was very smart. And he just partly discovered and partly kind of created a passion for this kind of work that has lasted my whole life. I mean it really is unlimited. I can’t imagine reaching the bottom of the well.
GS: Let’s move on to the early part of your career. I saw that you started with an agency called Fifty Fingers. Was there another agency called Spencer Francey Peters as well?
BM: It’s the same. They tried to get serious.
GS: And then you went to London and you spent some time at Pentagram. Which partner did you work with?
BM: David Hillman. It was awesome. I had a very difficult time there but also an amazing experience.
GS: What took you there initially?
BM: I had to get out of Toronto. Toronto now is one of the coolest cities in the world. 35 years ago, not so much. It was really before FedEx. You worked in the place that you lived. Almost exclusively, most people worked locally. And so you’re constrained by the local culture. So whatever they presented as opportunities, that’s what you’re going to do. And Toronto at the time was a branch, outpost of American businesses and American culture. And so it didn’t have the kind of critical mass that it now has of projects and opportunities. And also it was almost impossible to work, to do projects, in other cities unless you actually went there and did them.
We take for granted that we all work internationally now. When I went back to Toronto after London I started to work internationally and it was really challenging, it was hard to do. And flights were very expensive, faxes hadn’t really been invented yet. That kind of thing. So you just started to get the tools that we now take for granted so that you can work wherever you want to. So that’s why I went to London. And I loved London, I loved the culture. So many of the creative forces that I was really excited by were coming out of London.
When I was looking for a job, I went to an interview at Hipgnosis and it was like a mind trick, I was like, “Oh my God, this is awesome!” And so it was just great and I had a great time there. Pentagram was really by then a kind of corporate design studio which I didn’t like. I didn’t really like the approach of corporate design. And that I had a hard time with. And David was just a maniac, he was wild. And there were lots of fights which I also didn’t like.
GS: So then you came back to Toronto and teamed up with two of your friends, Steven Bock and Elizabeth Matheson to co-found an agency called Public Good Design and Communications. You had a very kind of specific remit, which was around work dedicated to public and non-profit organisations. Tell me a little bit about what it was that triggered you to specifically target that kind of work.
BM: Well, that was the real kind of insight that I had working at Pentagram. Because I work a lot, I love working and I work a lot. I just spend a lot of time doing this kind of work and it takes a lot of time. To do good work you just have to work and it’s a lot of work. At Pentagram I felt like I was designing the prison that I was going to be held in. It wasn’t a good feeling.
And so I talked to my friends in New York, Steve and Liz and they were also unhappy with their work, not having the experience that they had hoped for.
We decided to go back to Toronto as we’re all Canadians and set up Public Good. And the concept was very simple, we just wanted to do things that make the world a better place. We want to know that all the time and effort and creativity that we’re putting into this stuff is moving the world in the right direction. And it wasn’t more sophisticated than that. It was a pretty basic political idea but it turned out to be a fantastic idea to call the company Public Good. Because we had no money, no contacts and we all lived in an apartment that was also our studio.
Steve and Liz were a couple, so they had one bedroom and I had the other one. And we used the living room as our studio. And by doing it that way it meant that we could really do the things that we wanted to do. That we could do public good.
GS: Fantastic name.
BM: Well, the reason it’s a good name is that it’s like putting up a flag. So when we were really tight for money, you really couldn’t take the flag down and put up the Private Good flag. You had to really do it, you had to do Public Good. And you had to live by that. There were times that we were kind of super lean, but we made it work and in the end it became quite successful.
We had amazing clients too, remember, this is before the NGO revolution. The idea of doing basically an NGO for a studio was kind of unheard of. And it was very controversial at the time. People said to my face, “Who do you think you are that you can only do work that you love?” And I thought it was such a weird question: “What do you mean, who do I think I am? I just want to do the things that I love.” And they took it as an indictment of them — they read it as a critique. And I wanted to say, “Look, I don’t care about you, I really wasn’t thinking of you when I did this. I was just thinking of myself. We’re just thinking of how we can contribute!” But people were sure that it wasn’t possible, that you couldn’t actually have a business just doing good work. And that proved to be wrong.
It was a really important step. Essentially when I created my own studio I did it because my partners didn’t want to do a new project that we had to do. And they didn’t see it as public good and I did. So I said, Look, I’m going to do this! But that concept of Public Good has really been the concept of my work ever since.
GS: So you started Bruce Mau Design in 1985 on the back of your work for Zone publications. In a way the first publication you designed, Zone 1|2, the contemporary city, was ground-breaking for you wasn’t it?
“A city-book must be ‘legible’ at every angle and through every surface.” — Sanford Kwinter, Co-Founder of ZONE publishers, commenting on the design intention for ZONE 1|2 (1986).
BM: It really was.
GS: Did it receive a good reception when it launched?
BM: It did.
GS: I’m interested to know about your approach towards the publication itself. It has this strong digital feeling but is actually completely analogue in its production.
BM: I thought that was a very interesting observation in your question. And the kind of analogue / digital came out of my own research on pattern recognition and machine imaging.
I saw this article… I think it was in Scientific American. It was how computers are seeing images and how they actually construct edges which have these kinds of pixelated images. And I thought, that’s really interesting and beautiful and it kind of creates a digital feeling for future urbanism. So I kind of did a collage. It was very analogue in a composed way by collage and superimposition using photocopiers.
I worked with Sanford Kwinter and Michel Feher on that first project. Sanford really introduced the concept of pantheism to design. We began by looking at these incredible works coming out of Japan at the time. And we were really inspired by that and wanted to make a thing that behaved as a city. But it wasn’t an illustration of a city, it wasn’t just images of the city, but rather an object that actually performed the experience of the city. So that when you interacted with that object, it was as if you were being a city, you were holding a city in your hands. It had the jump cuts, the abrasiveness and serendipity of a city. And it had the feeling and experience of the city.
It came out of this concept of pantheism which is really the idea that the thing is alive. It’s a living thing and the surface is capable of anything at any time. It’s a very different concept to the rigid grid. It’s really like the whole surface is alive. And that surface extends beyond the object. So it’s almost like things are passing through it. It was a very intense intellectual exploration. And it created something new, that really hadn’t been seen before.
For me it was also most importantly an international thing. Even though I was in Toronto, I was working with the team in New York. And by then FedEx had happened, cheap flights had happened and faxes had happened. They really changed the design world and allowed me to be in Toronto and have an international practice.
GS: I assume this work significantly raised your international profile as it led to prestigious commissions for clients such as The Getty Institute and ID Magazine in New York. There’s another commission I’m also interested in hearing about, which is a local one to here — for the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi). For them you created maybe one of the first kinetic or dynamic visual identities. They are quite a design trend now but this was actually a while back now. I’m interested to know your process in creating the identity, how you managed to convince NAi to buy into it, and was it easy to implement? It’s got so many different visual appearances.
BM: It’s a great question, a great set of questions. I do think it’s one of the most important things I’ve done because you’re right, it created really a new model for what I called dynamic identity.
It was really about, how do you create something that really behaves like life? And that it lived and maintains its identity, but it’s constantly reiterating itself and expressing itself in new and fresh ways. If you think about a person, essentially you’re still the same person you were twenty years ago, but you’ve evolved and reiterated yourself. You’re a different person yet you’re the same and different. And that was really what I was trying to get at, which is to say, how do you make a living identity? So that you have an anchor that you hold onto, but you also have many expressions that can happen freely. It’s a challenging kind of puzzle to solve. In the case of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, when I started the project, they took me to their new facility and opened the vault, and it was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had. Because they had this giant vault, it was 200 meters long, it was huge. And the entire vault was that kind of rolling compressed shelving. And they took me to a spot, turned the crank and it opened up, and you could step inside. I walked inside and I looked over a landscape of the most incredible architectural projects in history. I mean it really was, my god, like just every important architectural concept throughout history was in that bank of endless shelving. And I realised I couldn’t do an identity that pinned into any one of those form languages. It was important for it not to be modern in the classical modern. It couldn’t be any of the existing form languages, because if it locked into one, it locked out everything else. I thought, I needed something that was the essence of architecture so I went to light and material. If you think about light and matter, for me that really is abstract architecture fully. And I thought, if I have a projection of light onto material, onto all kinds of different materials, and I keep the signature that I’m projecting constant, every projection will produce a different kind of image. But it all traces back to a constant original. So we created a hundred logo’s and a thousand colours. And that was the concept. And a thousand colours was inspired by a painting by Richter. He did a beautiful painting, I forget the number, I think it’s 1012 colours something like that. It’s a very beautiful painting, just of colour swatches. And I thought, that would be a really beautiful approach to the colour, where it’s a hundred logo’s and thousand colours.
GS: And how did you guideline that?
BM: It was quite strict in the sense that we gave them a hundred original photos and a thousand colours. I went to the design presentation at the institute in Rotterdam I think, after I had done all the work in Canada. And I did the presentation, and when it ended, I was very excited about the whole thing, and the director of the institute said, “Thank you so much.” That’s all!
GS: That was it? Sounds very Dutch.
BM: And then I was asked to leave! So, I went back to my hotel and I felt like it was the worst presentation I’d ever done. Then I had a meeting with the Director the next day and I went into it and said, “Well, I guess we have to start over?” But he said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Obviously you guys didn’t like the work.” But he said no, “Everything is perfect.”
GS: Brilliant.
BM: Print everything.
GS: Having lived in the Netherlands for 14 years now, that makes complete sense. I think you would certainly have heard immediately if there was any uncertainty. Dutch people don’t generally hold back on those things. I love their directness.
BM: Rem said to me, the Dutch see enthusiasm as a sign of weakness. It’s true, and explains everything. It’s so important to understand the culture of your client.
It’s so true, for instance Americans start with “yes,” and work to “no.” The French start with “no” and work to “yes.” In America you get applause at the end of the presentation. And then they start working out how they can’t do it.
You really have to know that kind of cultural context.
GS: Great advice. I’ll bear this in mind next time I’m working with American clients.
Let’s move on now to “S, M, L, XL.” For me, that book was a big deal. As I said, I was working in a multidisciplinary design agency called FITCH at the time, alongside architects, product designers, environmental designers and graphic designers. When the book came out everybody in the studio was really excited about it. The graphic designers were astounded by the size of the book and the way the content was arranged. Of course the architects were super excited about the work of Rem Koolhaas.
Personally I’d love to know more about the book, because it’s actually quite an achievement in print. At nearly 1400 pages it’s a mammoth! How much of a colossal task was it to create and what was the process in designing it with Rem Koolhaas? And, of course, you were also running your own design practice at the same time. So how did you balance those things? I imagine it must have taken up an awful lot of your time?
BM: It nearly killed us both! It was much more than we bargained for. It was one of those things that happened quite innocently. You know, Rem had a contract to do a monograph of 256 pages. And he wanted me to do it with him. So I went to Rotterdam where he was working with Jennifer Sigler, who is really the third author on the project. And they had made a mock-up. Rem described to me what he wanted to accomplish. And I wasn’t convinced of what they had done. And so we did some work on exploring it and at some point I said, “Look, let’s just fold it in half and get twice as many pages.” Because you know, my theory was a double-paged spread is a double-paged spread, whether the page is this big or this big. So let’s make it this big and then we are going to have twice as many pages.
GS: It’s quite an unusual format, isn’t it? It’s deep but quite small in actual page size.
BM: Exactly. That first fold gave us around five hundred pages. And then we ended up folding it 1.5 more times. Which ended up with around 1.5 thousand pages. And that really set the tone for the project.
And the reason I wanted more pages was that I wanted a more cinematic feel. I saw in what Rem was describing and what he was trying to do, was very filmic. It was a new kind of narrative. I wanted to create filmic experiences with cinematic sequences. To do that I needed lots of frames and I needed the frames in the film. And that really is how it started.
It really goes back in some ways to “Zone 1 | 2.” I wanted people to experience the reality of architectural life. You know, what it means to dig a hole in the ground and change the world. It’s not that pristine, stupid idea of you know, perfect places without people. Without sex or death or events of any kind. If you look around the same time Isozaki had a show of his work at MOCA in LA. They made these incredible high-definition video films of his buildings. But literally without people. I don’t know how they managed to do it. But they literally vacated the city and would show this perfect building in a perfect landscape, perfectly without people. I saw it and felt this is just super weird and contrary to everything I believe. I think architecture is for people. You know, architecture is the evidence of the crime. You’re really creating an event that takes place and you’re defining and designing the event experience of that place.
And so it has a lot more to do with cinema than you would think. So our work must shape that cinematic experience so that people really understand viscerally, not just intellectually, the work and the concepts behind it. I was teaching at Rice University and I once did a diagram of the way we work. The students there were really insistently asking me how we worked. And I said:
“This is the conventional approach to authorship. They start here and the amplitude is the ability to go into the world freely. So you can go out into the world and synthesise what you’re seeing and put it together and bring it back and figure out what it is, and order it, and structure it and clarify it. At some point you hand what you do to the designer. And the designer has that last stretch of the work. They then do their own amplitude. So you end up with a little box at the end.”
If you think about the time of a project, that’s a pretty fair description. The author has a huge amount of time and the designer has a pretty small amount. Most importantly, their amplitude is defined by the author. So the content actually defines how big that box is going to be. And what we did instead was, we said, “We’re going to start together and we’re going to travel together through the project. And we’re going to make a diagram that looks like that!”
And that’s really what happened. And if you think about it this space between the lines is really where the action is, right? That is the zone of collaboration. Where you’re traveling together but you’re seeing it from a slightly different perspective and you’re seeing different things and you’re having a different kind of viewpoint. And that produces a kind of conflict and tension and productivity. It produces some negatives and positives, but importantly it produces a new thing. My argument was, no matter how much you invest in that final box in the conventional diagram, you’re not going to get “S,M,L,XL.” If you do a manuscript and you give it to a designer and say, make it exactly like “S,M,L,XL,” it’s not going to happen. We have to do the travelling together part of it. And so I went to almost all the projects with Rem. We literally travelled, had holidays and lived together for five years. We went everywhere together. It was mayhem.
GS: My next question is about “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.” Please correct me if I’m wrong but in 1998, I think you were 39, and you produced a 34-point program on sustaining a creative practice called an “Incomplete Manifesto For Growth.” In it, you outlined your beliefs, strategies and motivations to assist users in forming and assessing their own design process. What did you hope to achieve with it and who were you specifically trying to reach by sharing this manifesto? And, by the way, I don’t think I ever would have done something like that at the age 39. It was a brave move, wasn’t it? Putting yourself out there like that.
BM: You know, it wasn’t — I didn’t see it that way. It is a manifesto in a very kind of gentle spirit. Not as a kind of hardcore political manifesto. But it turns out to have, I think, a very strong political message. In some ways the last point of the manifesto kind of says it best, which is power to the people. It really is about, how do you control your creative life? You know, how do you sustain a creative life over the long haul?
For me 39 actually was an important moment to think about that, because it’s easy to be a hot designer for a season, for a certain amount of time. It’s an altogether different business to sustain a creative practice through your whole life. And that was really the pattern that I was looking at. How do we design our lives in such a way that it supports the risk of creative work? And one of the things I think is evident in the manifesto is that I realised that success can kill you even more than failure.
GS: You mean it forces you into a certain style, or something?
BM: Yes. Your success lives outside of you, not in you. So it actually lives in the community and the community decides that’s who you are and that’s what they want and that’s all they want. It can really kill a creative life.
GS: Were you feeling that at 39?
BM: I was. Let’s say I’ve always been aware of that and tried to cause good trouble, as they say. You know, I’ve always tried to get ahead of that. For me the proof is in the work and the work is either resonating on different frequencies or it’s not. So success can be very damaging because it pushes things into the rut. It pushes things into a pathway that’s already been established. So it’s challenging for people to go through success towards experimentation. Because when you’re first starting out, no-one’s watching. You’re basically in a room by yourself. So you can fall down and get all scratched up and no-one sees it. You have a lot more freedom and willingness to make mistakes and to do stupid things and try things that don’t work. All of that is really central to a creative life. The more successful you get, the more the floodlights are focused on what you do.
I did some work with Kanye West and it was unbelievable. The incessant focus on his behaviour and anything that he did or didn’t do was magnified a million times. And it was just insane, the kind of scrutiny. When I think about people who are really famous I just think, “Wow!” I mean, it’s really challenging. I think as a designer you’re putting yourself out constantly. When you’re creating things, every day is a day of risk that you’re putting out a version of yourself and hoping that it resonates in the world in a certain positive way. Until you’re constantly under this kind of microscope. So how do you sustain your creative life?
And there are lots of little ways that we lose it. There are lots of little compromises and little decisions and little movements that we make that have the effect of slipping away from a creative life. So that’s really what it was about.
GS: So 23 years later down the line would you adapt any of the content now or change it for a different audience? If so, how? We’re almost a generation further now, in a way.
BM: Yes. I’ve been thinking about an “Incomplete Manifesto for Health.” And I’ve actually been thinking about an Incomplete Manifesto for what I call “WHEALTH.” Because I think one of the big mistakes I’ve made in my life is to sacrifice myself for my ambitions. I heard this incredible phrase that resonates with me. And that is, “You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.”
GS: That’s brilliant. Who said that?
BM: It was in a kind of therapy session of some kind. I can’t remember exactly, but I thought, what a brilliant insight. And I was reading about Carl Jung recently and he said… Let me just read it, I have it right here, actually: “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on our environment and especially on our children than the unlived life of the parent.”
GS: That’s so true.
BM: So, I think one of the challenges that I have faced my whole life is that I put the work ahead of everything else. And so I would just stay up later and work harder and do whatever it took. You know, I’m an extremist. And I think that if you carefully look at the manifesto, there is a kind of cri de coeur for balance. And I’m still searching for it.
GS: I read an interview with you recently where it sounded like you may have found that balance now. It describes you swimming every day at home with your daughters and wife.
BM: I would say that that’s partially true. Or let’s say, largely true. I mean, the happiness with my family is certainly true. But I would say that I’m never going to be peaceful, I think, in my relationship with work. You know, it’s going to be a fight to the finish.
GS: Next question is about your love of books. You have designed, I read somewhere, over two hundred books now? Considering the amount of work that goes into designing a single book that is an amazing achievement.
BM: But remember. It is also the output of a studio. There are a lot of contributors to that effort.
GS: Of course. What is it about books that you love in particular?
BM: Well, there are a number of things that I think are really awesome. One is it is one of the most powerful narrative formats ever invented. If you think about the narrative format of memory, a book is really unmatched. For all of our technology, technology does many many wonderful things which you cannot accomplish in a book. But nothing supersedes the experience of a book.
And the reason is that it has a kind of live memory that is sequential. It is a kind of physical sequential memory that allows us the discipline of ordering ideas. So, if I am going to tell you a story, there is a reason it has a beginning, middle, and end. There is a reason that it is a three-act play. There is a reason that we are standing in the presence, reflecting on the past and imagining the future.
I have been working with a man named Walter Parks, who was Steven Spielberg’s producer. And by producer I mean much beyond that. He is one of the most amazing creative people I have ever worked with. And he talks to me about what he calls distilled narrative. Which is that if you think about what Hollywood does, it takes a thousand-page book and compresses it into a hundred and twenty typed pages of manuscript. A screenplay, yeah. And he said, “Look, if you think about how much work goes into that compression. You know, that distillation of pushing it down to that kind of sequence.” I think books have that same kind of dimension, that they force us into a sequential articulation of ideas.
And I think of books as a controlled release of information in time. And that is my kind of definition of a book. That is what it does. If you think about what the typography does. The typography is the accelerator. In other words, if you press on it, you are going to make it go faster. And if you ease off, you can make it go slower. And that kind of control of the time of release is the design of the book. So you are kind of designing that controlled experience. And so for me the form is so beautiful, experientially.
Like when I think about MC24. This thing is so satisfying to me, as I had all the files on my computer. I had even more, like three or four times as much, content on my computer. But it is not like the experience of the book. And Marcia McLaughlin said that when technology loses its utility, it becomes an art form. If you think about hot-metal type. Or wood type. It does not make sense anymore to do wood type, so it is an art form. And artists use it and they make beautiful things. And similarly, the content of a book does not any longer need the format of the book to be distributed. I can distribute the content of MC24 much more efficiently digitally than I can physically. And so the physical becomes an art form. And in my case my practice is making books.
GS: I was just thinking back to when I first read your book Life Style. Just opening the first few pages. I think I have seen it described as cinematic. You intentionally accompanied full-page images with very little text. Quite a few pages before you actually got into more and more of the content. That is what you are describing, is it not?
BM: It is. One thing I realised is that my books are post-cinematic books. In other words, you would not do them if cinema had not been experienced before. I did a class at Berkeley for a friend, one of the editors of Zone and I showed I think four or five books. And I realised all the books have opening credits. Like the opening credits of a movie.
And they set the tone, you know. The opening credits used to be a kind of legal function that you had to do. And they put in cards, you know, really basic. People like Saul Bass turned it into an art form and really used it to set the tone and put the audience in a place where they were ready for the movie. And I do a very similar thing in the book. That is why for me, it has to start immediately. I do not want any pages of half title and all that kind of stuff. I want to get immediately into the content.
GS: Let us move to the next question. You have collaborated with a number of highly inspiring people including Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg, to name just three. Is there anyone you haven’t yet had the chance to work with, but would love to?
BM: You know, I am very agnostic about that. Anyone committed to making the world a better place I am open to a conversation. I have figured out artists that I love, but realised through my study and research of John Cage and I Ching and people like that, that I have never really pushed for things. I just let things unfold. So I try not to hunt down my heroes, because after it turns out they are not quite as great as I imagined. So, I take a very open attitude.
And the beauty of the life of a designer is that the phone rings and the world changes. All of a sudden you are off to Guatemala. And you have no idea. You know, like a minute before the phone rang, you had no idea that there was a problem there you would be in some ways able to contribute.
When I was quite young I had this really weird idea in my mind that there was a kind of thin filament around the whole world. And in that thin layer, there were particles. And the particles were very, very far apart. And the particles were people. And they were the people that I was looking for, that I needed to do my work. And they were also looking for me, but they did not know it yet. They did not know who I was. They did not know anything about me. But I was the perfect person for them. They were perfect for me and I was perfect for them. And I realized that the only way for them to find me was to put a signal into that filament, that was the truth.
You know, that was exactly who I was and what I wanted to do. And therefore, to put out that signal, I had to do as much as possible what I wanted to do. And if I would put it out long enough, they would find me. And that is really what happened. I found one in Toronto, I found one in New York, I found one in Rotterdam. It became very, very important for me. I found one in LA and over the years, you know, I found them and they found me.
And if you compromise your work, you are putting out a confusing signal. People do not know how to find you. So they do not know what you stand for. So I lived very modestly. I lived like a student for ten years, so that I could do that. And it worked out very well.
GS: Let us move on now to the Institute Without Boundaries. I was intrigued by that. In about 2003, in collaboration with the School of Design of the George Brown College in Ontario. It is an academic program and studio. The focus is on collaborative design practice, the projectors of social, ecological and economic innovations through design, research and strategy. What did you hope to achieve in co-founding the program and what have been some of the highlights of being involved with it?
BM: I wanted to clarify one thing in your question, which is that they commissioned it and I founded it. They approached me and it was a very weird situation. A friend of mine called me and said Bruce, you know, I would like to come and talk to you about something. So we met in a bar near my studio and she had a couple of friends with her from George Brown College. And they said, “We checked with the lawyers and we can name the design school after you, without your permission. We can honour you by naming the design school after you.”
And I thought, that is a very weird idea. I said, you know, what if I do something bad and end up in jail? Like they are going to have a design school, you know, based on a delinquent. And she explained, well it is not really what we want to do. But we just wanted to know whether we could do it. What we would really like to do is to commission you to do an experiment in design education. And we have the funding and we have the permission from the government and we basically have what it takes to allow you to do that.
And so I went and I said well, that is a really weird way of suggesting it. But let me think about, you know, what I would do if I was going to do that. And they said, we have a design school already. You know, that is The Conventional Design School, so we do not need to do that. We do not want you to do that. We want you to do something new.
And so I went away and I sort of had in my mind a project that would eventually become “MASSIVE CHANGE.” And I thought of a way to do that. If I was going to design design education, I would do purpose-driven experienced-based entrepreneurial design learning. A real challenge was its purpose. We are actually going to do something together that we do not know yet. So it is purpose-driven, experience-based. I did not have a curriculum in a classical sense that I was going to transfer to them. I did not know the answer. I knew a methodology. So I knew an experience that we were going to have together and we were both going to work it through. So, it is really experience-based. And the real insight of that invention was to realize that the content is not the product. And most universities are certain that the product that they sell is the content.
They think, okay, we are going to give you this content and by the end of that period, you are going to have all this content in your file to match our file. And that is not the world anymore. Because I discovered from my research that fully half of the content of a technical degree today is outmoded by the time you graduate.
But if you are taking a degree in some kind of technical subject, half of what you learn is broken. So, it cannot be the product. And when we think about college, what do we remember? We do not remember the equations. We remember the experience. But we do almost nothing to design the experience.
And we think that if we just put the right content into it, it certainly is going to be good. But if you look at the performance of education. I mean if you had a client that was losing the number of consumers that education does, they would go out of business. And so we said, look, the real product is the experience, not content. So what we are going to do, is we are going to introduce purpose and experience into an entrepreneurial model. So, they become entrepreneurs in their experience. They become entrepreneurial learners. And that is what I proposed to George Brown. And to their credit, they said yes.
They allowed me to do it independent of the school. The school was actually in my studio. We took twelve students into the studio and hired a director and basically did it independent of the university. And weirdly almost no one from the university ever showed up. It was kind of ideal. And when we finished the project, we realised that roughly half of our students created new businesses. If you look at the start-up rate for American business schools, it is five per cent. We had a tenfold increase in the start-up rate.
And that, you know, was really the invention of a new model. And it was actually the project that introduced me to Michael Crow at ASU. When I explained the concept of purpose-driven experienced-based entrepreneurial learning he said how many students have you got? I said twelve students. And he said well, we are going to do that with sixty-five thousand students. And you are going to help me. We are going to go to ninety thousand. And it is exactly what we did.
They really reorganised the whole university around purpose and fundamentally reinvented ASU. When I got involved they were the number one party school in America. And they have been the number one school for innovation for the last seven years.
GS: I want to talk now about the setting up of the Massive Change Network in 2010. You are also Chief Design Officer of experience design Freeman. How do you split your time between those? They sound like big roles to fill. Do you have clearly defined activities and clients with each one?
BM: Freeman is one of our clients. It was a client of Massive Change Network. We did a big project for them to help them become a design-based company. That was our original mandate as Freeman was originally a logistics company. They said, you know, we want to be designers in business. What would it take to make that transition?
So we did a year-long project with them, a consulting project. And we mapped out what they had to do over that time. They said, we would like you to come on board full time to do it. And I said I really respect and love you guys, but I do not think that would be my best contribution. I would lose my contact with the rest of the world, which is most valuable for you.
Instead I proposed I would work the way George Nelson worked with Herman Miller. Nelson was never employed by Herman Miller. He maintained his own studio in New York the whole time, but took responsibility for design direction at Herman Miller. He set the agenda and brought the talent. And they said if you think that is the best way to do it, let us do it.
So I have been working with Bob Priest-Heck, who is now the CEO. He was president at the time, he is now the CEO. Bob Priest-Heck and Carrie Freeman and it has been a really amazing journey, but is now coming to its end. It has now been six years. And we more or less accomplished what we set out to do in creating a big design studio with a few hundred designers that is really leading the innovation development of new live experience business. I sit on the executive group as one of the senior executives as chief design officer. And I help them apply design to their business. So whether it is thinking about finance or thinking about strategy or thinking about the actual product. We are really thinking in a design methodology for the whole enterprise. And I am responsible for my vertical, which is the design group. You know, I built the team and basically invented all the infrastructure of design for them.
GS: And it’s been going through massive change itself too has it not? With the past year of not being able to hold live experiences.
BM: Yeah, it has been a tragic year for the live experience business. We had to furlough and layoff thousands of people. And the whole industry just set down to zero. And it will be challenging to get it back, because we need all the other things to come back too. Like you need to feel safe traveling, you need to feel safe in hotels, you need to feel safe in big meetings, you need to feel safe in restaurants and clubs. All that stuff has to come back. But what we are seeing is an incredible pent-up demand. I think what we discovered in the pandemic was just how beautiful live experiences are. How essential it is to who we are. So that has been quite a wonderful reassertion of how important live experience is. So that is my relationship with Freeman.
Massive Change Network is really my partnership with Bisi, who is a force of nature and an incredible collaborator. She has really been part of the story the whole time. When we had children we were in a fortunate enough position that she could work at home and focus on that part of our life. As a consequence we have had an absolutely fantastic life. I mean, really amazing. But when you do that, the risk is really born by the woman. And the deal, in a sense, is okay. She did the support, allowing me to work like a demon at the time and accomplish what we were able to accomplish. Now our children are adults, she has the time to really work like a demon herself on this side of the work.
So we are trying to work in a more balanced way. But we have the freedom to really make the kind of intense commitment that it takes to do creative work. I think that some people need to balance it on a daily basis. And I think that makes it difficult to get great results. Whereas I think what we have done is balance it on a lifetime basis. That allows for a lot more flexibility, a lot more focus. It allows you to really go deep when you need to. If you think about the kind of work that I do there are sometimes things where it takes you more than eight hours to start the work. It takes you a long time to kind of get the project into your mind in a way that you can actually begin to see it holistically and start to see the opportunity. And that might take, you know, eighteen hours. You are not going to get there in eight hours, necessarily. You have got to have flexibility about that kind of thinking. And we are able to do that, and as a consequence, we have had an absolutely awesome life together.
We really like to travel together. When I produced “S, M, L, XL” I was on press for six weeks in Milan, twenty-four hours a day. We had two presses running twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. You have to be there. You have to be available all the time and you have to fit your life and your sleep into what was left, if you are going to do that work. We were able to live there for a couple of months. We had a wonderful apartment that was given to us by the people from Flash Art. And we just had an absolutely beautiful experience in Milan for that time. If at the time she was also managing another career that just goes away. Then you are there by yourself for six weeks and it is a bit of a nightmare. Instead it was absolutely wonderful.
There have been some bumps along the way, you know. But all in all, it has been an absolutely awesome life, this design life. It really is testament to Bisi and her elastic mind. She is one of the most incredible thinkers with an ability for insight that is extraordinary. She has a background in literature and journalism, so brings a whole other language, worldview and history. I am best in the present tense and she clearly has the rest of history at her fingertips. So, it has been an absolutely wonderful life.
Massive Change Network is really dedicated with a kind of transformative application of design through the MC24 principles. And what is really exciting for me and Bisi is that all the people you work with are understanding the urgency of that work and wanting to do Massive Change. We are getting insanely ambitious challenges that are really exciting. It is like we’ve worked for thirty-five years to put us on the starting line for this work.
GS: I wanted to talk to you about your design businesses in particular. Reading about them it feels like you intentionally cultivate a special creative culture. I like the fact, for instance, that you are keen on a diverse mix of skills in-house from designers to film makers, architects, writers and artists. I also read that some people that work with you see you as a kind of professor. And that some people refer to the studios as Bruce Mau University. I do not know if that terminology is something you like or not? I thought it was magic though.
BM: I do. I do.
GS: But what does this unusual mix of skills bring to your work? And how would you describe the unique culture of your studios?
BM: I think it is quite unique. And I did not realise how unique it was. You know, I didn’t really have a design education. So, I did not know what the boundaries were. But I was very interested in theory and history of design. And I realized in graphic design, there was almost nothing. It was like maybe fifty years. I mean, it was very, much more technical and less theoretical. You know, there was less history and little thinking about the kind of language of it. And still I discovered that language in two closely related domains, one was architecture and the other was cinema.
Cinema has a lot of history and theory about the image and about, the kind of semiotics and the whole culture of cinema. And similarly, architecture has a very long history. You know, cinema is quite recent, but architecture has a very long history of design, theory and culture.
And so I went to those domains, to try to really inform what I was doing in graphic design. And that led me to people in those domains. Film makers really are developing a kind of method and technique and touch for that kind of compressed thinking. And some architects are thinking about time and they’re thinking about space. And they’re thinking about environments and the kind of language and politics and the history of the effects of the design environment. You get a much richer place.
So I hired a lot of young architects, partly because when I first started there was a real slump and people couldn’t get jobs. I was able to hire really brilliant, young architects and show them a new kind of practice, in a way that they never wanted to go back to architecture.
So, what we were able to do, was to create a construct that was more inclusive than the thing that it was consuming. And similarly, if you think about what we’re doing now, with life-centered design, it includes human-centered design, but it’s a bigger idea. It’s a bigger construct.
We had a similar kind of experience back then and I began assembling a studio. I didn’t really have a vision for it, it just happened organically that I met and discovered really wonderful people. And I just had a way of falling in love with these people, somehow bringing them into the process and into the culture. I remember, it was actually Bill Buxton. He became a Principal Researcher at Microsoft. He called me one day and said, “I’m going to be your chief scientist.” And I said, “Bill, I really don’t have a call for a true scientist,” and he said, “I’m coming over there.”
So he came and worked in the studio for about a year and a half and helped us with Massive Change. He was really instrumental. And it was Bill who said what you’re really in need of is a renaissance team. You can no longer have a renaissance person, because the bodies of knowledge are too vast and too deep, but you can have a renaissance team. You can put people together in ways that create something that none of them could create on their own. And that’s really why we created the Massive Change Network. He called it a renaissance team.
I thought it was a brilliant insight and I said, “I don’t think you realize how good you guys are at collaboration.” He said, “Almost everybody talks about it, but when you walk into the studio, you feel it and it’s a different kind of thing.” And it’s really true. I think that there is in fact a methodology of collaboration and in “MC24” I articulate the seven behaviours of the team and what it means to be a team player. It is a unique kind of skill set.
So the renaissance team culture happened organically and we just evolved it. But it began with something that was really powerful in the way we work and that was the kind of engine. The originating concept of Massive Change Network. To say, you know what we can actually spend that much bigger and you don’t have to live in my studio to be part of this. You can join with us on a project and maybe we do a project once a year that you participate in or a year full time. There’s a range of engagement. We have people that I work with all the time and they’re in fact full time in the studio. But we also have a big group of people that are connected to what we do, that provide certain kinds of expertise and insights as needed. So it’s much broader. What we realised was that I had a very old-fashioned idea about how a business runs. You’re either in, or you’re out. You either work for me, or you’re dead to me. And I realised I could completely change that idea and have a model where it’s much more about what do you want to do? What’s your passion? What do you really love? What’s your expertise and how can that be part of a mix? So you can have the best possible experience in your life and work.
GS: Let’s talk about that lovely book in the background behind you, MC24. I think it has the best standout of any book I’ve seen on a bookshelf for a long time.
Bruce Mau: “MC24”
BM: Someone described it as a light source! It’s a magical thing. They did such a beautiful job of it.
GS: Published last year it’s a methodology of your twenty-four design principles, developed over the course of three decades in design, that can be applied to any type of challenge at any scale to create impact on positive design change. These principles underpin all of your work.
How would you recommend other designers to utilise these principles in their work and what do you see as the benefits of doing so?
BM: What I tried to do in the book was to really articulate the principle. So, here’s the idea, here’s the model, here’s maybe an exercise we’re thinking about, how to do it? And then here’s some examples of either we’ve done it or other people have done it. Tried to create an impact.
Many of the principles are really disorienting. “We Are Not Separate From or Above Nature,” that’s a concept that can be traced back to Genesis, where the kind of original mistake was made. Genesis 1:26, God gives us nature and God gives us dominion over every creeping thing that creeps upon on the earth. And what you realise is that that idea is probably the most damaging sentence in the history of the written word.
The idea that somehow we own the natural world. That it’s limitless and it’s ours to use up. That could be a kind of true mythology for most of history. When we were less than a million people, it didn’t really matter what we did. But when you’re eight billion, nine billion, ten billion…
Copernicus had this discovery, that we’re not the center of the universe. But practically every year since then, we have been trying to prove him wrong and try to reassure our central place in the universe. What we realise is that we have to have a whole different worldview, a whole different mindset. That puts life and not humans at the center and that is truly disorienting. It’s a fundamentally different cosmology, so if you lean into the principles, it’s a very challenging way of thinking. You really can disrupt your equilibrium. And it takes time for people to absorb it and to develop an understanding to say that’s going to really change the way I work. Because, if I don’t have control over nature and I begin to develop a methodology that’s actually sympathetic with life, it’s going to change the materials I use and the energy I use and the processes and the outcomes I design and the goals and the mission.
It’s a fundamental, transformational impact. And that’s what the principles are for. We need to radically change our design practices, because we are a linchpin in decision-making. We are very, very important moments in a process that determines how the world is going to go. We have this incredible power, even though we’re powerless. We have this incredible opportunity to set the agenda in the way that we think. And my view and my argument in “MC24,” is that once we see it, we have a responsibility to work that way. A responsibility to help our clients see the new world and to take them there, as quickly as possible, and to show them that vision and to systematically move them to that vision. And that’s really the kind of underlying ambition of “MC24.”
To build these people those tools. And what’s cool right now, is that we’re working with UT Dallas Center for Brain Health, on the neuroscience of Massive Change. The woman who runs it, Doctor Sandy Chapman, approached me and said, “I don’t know how you did this, because you’re obviously not a neuroscientist. But every one of the MC24 principles is really a brain technique.” She thinks of it as a neuroscience transformation, that you’re actually changing your brain to work in a new way and that you’re physically building a new brain. And what’s really amazing is that she believes we can double our brain capacity.
And she has already demonstrated in a few months, a ten percent increase. So she believes that if we really design the methodology in the processes, we can double our capacity. Even at any age the plasticity of the brain is actually available to you. So, you can increase your capacity dramatically, even in later years.
GS: That’s an ongoing process you’re working on now?
BM: Yes. We’re now starting that research project with them. They have the neuroscience, and we have the designs. So we’re taking our design methodology and they’re describing what’s actually happening in what they call the neuro-pharmacy when you do certain things. It turns out that inspiration changes the chemical makeup of your brain so it behaves differently and you become capable in new ways. My intuitive insight, that it’s important to be optimistic as a designer, is now actually built on a scientific foundation. And we can explain what happens to your brain when you’re optimistic and how it prepares you for having ideas. So if you want ideas, you need to do certain things.
GS: Tell me about the major documentary about yourself, which was recently premiered at SXSW in the United States. I want to understand how the idea initially came about and how you feel about having a documentary made about you?
BM: It was a weird experience. It was the idea of the two guys who made it, two brothers, filmmakers Benji and Jono Bergmann. We had worked with Benji at the UN when he was the Assistant Director of Communications for the UN. He saw what we were doing and it turns out that he was really inspired. Eventually he became a filmmaker with his brother and a few years later came back and said I’d really like to do a documentary about your life and work.
Initially we were quite reluctant to do it as it felt a weird thing to do. But they were very persistent and somehow, eventually we decided that we would do it. They did all the work, I mean, it’s not my project. And so, if I was going to curate the work I don’t think I would do that. I think it is time for someone else. I believe it is my responsibility to make it difficult. Right? To really explore ideas and work and invention and culture as best I can. Not try to resolve the inconsistencies or the shortcomings — leave that for other people.
GS: I’d also love to hear more about the Design Excellence Award given to you by The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2015.
The Philadelphia museum is one of my favorite museums. They have the biggest collection of Duchamp. It’s incredible — a really beautiful museum. They gave me their design prize, and with it comes an exhibition of your work. And they really wanted to do more of a retrospective look. I convinced them that I really focus on what I am trying to do now. And so, I was able to avoid a retrospective to some degree. The one thing that they did, that was ultimately very beautiful, was they showed two hundred of the book designs.
GS: It must have felt special, to see all that work?
BM: It was one wall with two hundred books on a point grid. It was a very beautiful installation. And I had never seen it like that before. When you are doing books, you are doing one at the time and it accumulates over 35 years to be around 260 books. And so, we selected two hundred and showed them, and it was really something quite beautiful. And it was a special way of seeing them that I had never seen before.
GS: When you saw your body of work presented in front of you I’m interested to know if you could see a strong visual signature coming through or did you simply view them as different chapters in your career?
BM: That is a good question, actually. There are definitely certain things that happen visually at different times and it was done chronologically. It really started with “Zone 1|2” and then Zone became a huge project. We did something like over a hundred books with them, over a 25-year period. A long time. So, there were some things that you can see. But I don’t go into projects with a kind of aesthetic ambition. I really try to allow the aesthetic to emerge from the work.
With Zone for instance I was very deliberate to create a visual language that was very distinctive. If you were reading philosophy and you saw a Zone book, it was obvious that it was by them through the very particular visual language. But overall, I think there is a diversity in the practice. At least for me, I mean, it might not be so to others. But as an artist, you see a kind of subtlety in the diversity that maybe other people don’t see. But yes, it was wonderful to see.
GS: We are at the last section now. You’ve been in this profession for more than three decades. What have been the biggest changes and challenges you’ve witnessed in the creative industry over the course of that time?
BM: When I started, people didn’t care about the environment. Really. I mean, it wasn’t a big point of discussion. An environmental movement was only just emerging. But today the biggest change is that we have to change everything. I mean, pretty much everything. Pretty much everything we do, is done in the old way. It is really done in the past model. And almost nothing that we do has really been accomplished in perpetuity. We haven’t really accomplished perpetuity for anything. And we have to. That is the challenge of the 21st century. Suddenly, the way that we do things has to become a central consideration. And more importantly, what we do.
One of the companies that I worked with that was very satisfying was Emeco, They make furniture. We developed a concept for them, which was “First let’s make things that last.” Let’s make things that people actually want to keep, that they don’t want to throw away. Inevitably, sometimes it’s going to be thrown away. But when it does, make it so that you can actually recover the material. But let’s start by making things we actually never want to throw away and get out of this garbage culture.
Sadly we don’t think waste is an idea. We just think it is, like a universal forever. And so, the shift to life-centred design is profoundly disorienting and rupturing our old ways of thinking. I didn’t realise how big an idea it was and how transformative it would have to be, in order to really realise its potential. And the more that I work on it, the more that I realise, this is now my life’s work. I basically have one project for the rest of my life, which is life-centred design and helping people to see it, understand it and do it. That is really what I have to do.
GS: Amazing. I’d like to now talk about awards. You must have won many awards in your career. Which ones are the most meaningful and for which works?
BM: I think in some way, being named an honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society for the Arts was really important because it kind of triggered the MC24 process.
The RSA has a programme called Royal Designers for Industry. It was started by Benjamin Franklin. Basically, the concept started during the Industrial Revolution. He wanted to put artists together with industry because he realised that, with these new industrial processes, you could make huge demands of things, but they were ugly. He wanted to make them more beautiful. And so, he introduced this concept and convinced the RSA to have this designation where only two hundred people would be named Royal Designer for Industry. For me it was a big deal that I was named an honorary Royal Designer for the Industry because I’m not British.
GS: When did you receive that award?
BM: I think it was about ten years ago, maybe eleven. As part of the process, they sent a group of young leaders. The RSA has these leadership programmes and they sent a group to Chicago to visit our studio. And I did a presentation for them and I showed them our work. They said, but what kind of designer are you? Because you are making carpets and cities and brands and businesses and institutions and social movements. We think of design being defined by a product. Designers are defined by their products. So, if you are a graphic designer you do two-dimensional things and if you are a product designer you do products. And if you are an architect you do buildings. But you are not like that. So, how do you do it?
And I said, “You should have paid attention because I just showed you how we do it.” And they said, “No, you showed us the results. You actually didn’t mention in any way how you did it. What do you think?” And I realised that I didn’t actually have an answer, that I had just developed this methodology over 25 years intuitively. It was an organic thing where we started with graphic design and then clients asked us to do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more.
And then all of a sudden, we were designing Mecca. And I never had a vision for designing Mecca, it just happened. It happened organically. And I realised that you can’t have such consistent success without principles. There must be principles behind this way of thinking. And that we should really understand what they are because they could be quite helpful for other people. And so, that designation really was a trigger for a whole new way of thinking and working. And that really set off the MC24 method.
GS: Fantastic that it triggered that. We are at the last question now. What in your opinion has been your greatest achievement so far? And looking ahead, what would you hope your legacy to be?
BM: These are tough questions. I think, from my achievements, I would say, a design ethic. I think what I have been able to do, that I am proud to tell my children about, is that I stayed in the game and I have tried to do the best I could. And tried to bring an ethical and just approach to my work, to kind of contribute to the world. And it is hard to do, at times it was very rough, and I have fallen off the horse more than once. But I think that I have done a pretty good job of actually sustaining that. And that really goes back to Public Good. I tried to do it there and I can see it in that work. And there are lots of wonderful things that I am very proud of along the way. Like projects that we have been able to create and contributions that we have been able to make. But I think that a design ethic of public good is probably the best thing I have done.
Going back to the awards for a second, for me, one of the most touching was the Cooper Hewitt Design Mind Award. Because it was an acknowledgement that there was a kind of body of intelligence that was being created beyond the individual work. I really was very touched by and very appreciative that people saw that. It was a surprise to me. You know, I didn’t enter it, my studio entered it on my behalf. From an achievement standpoint, I think that is it.
From a legacy standpoint, I hope that we can really contribute a working methodology of life-centered design. And every day it becomes more urgent.
It’s weird how effective it is in assessing opportunities. Someone showed me a big project a few days ago and asked me to be involved in it, and I said “no.” They were just absolutely doing the wrong thing. And I had to tell them what was wrong with it. Then I said, “If you want to do it right, I would love to be involved. But I think that so much of what we are doing as humans is going the wrong direction.” With MC24, you can really look at it and say, “Here is why it is wrong. Let me tell you the three principles that you are breaking that are fundamentally against our future and the future of life!” So, for me, I just feel I need to do as much work as I possibly can on life-centered design.
GS: Many thanks for your time today.
BM: Thank you Graham. I really enjoyed it.
A global design consultancy dedicated to accelerating positive change through life-centered design, Co-Founded by Aiyemobisi “Bisi” Williams and Bruce Mau.
About the author:
Graham Sturt is an independent Creative Director based in Amsterdam.
Originally from England, he lived and worked in London for more than a decade before relocating to Amsterdam to follow his passion for Dutch design.
