Design = Everything

When Kathleen Bartels became the director at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2001, she wanted to rethink the way the museum puts on design exhibitions. At about the same time, the Toronto designer Bruce Mau wanted to rethink design itself. The results of their combined ambition are on view until January 3 in the exhibition "Massive Change: The Future of Global Design," which abandons the notion that design shows in art museums must feature polished objects set gently upon spot-lit pedestals. Most design exhibits intend to change your teacups--this one intends to change your life.

The surprise is that it actually seems like a reasonable proposition. In addition to the exhibition, which will tour internationally beginning in 2005, the "Massive Change" project includes a book, website, symposium, radio series and documentary film, all with a single beguilingly simple thesis: Design is the process that makes the world; properly harnessed, it can make it better. "Massive Change" proves this point by presenting a range of objects and ideas that raise the possibility of a better future: Segway scooters, genetically modified foods, advanced biomass stoves, manufactured housing, micro-loans, and PVC-free chairs, among others. All demonstrate, as the exhibition's mantra puts it, "the human capacity to plan and produce outcomes across the entire spectrum of human activity."

Think of this as Mau's version of a new world order. Some ideologues send in armies to extend their vision of the future--Mau wants to stock the art museums with utopian propaganda. As "Massive Change" mantra number two has it: "Design has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility." Bold stuff for a Saturday afternoon at the gallery.

A few years ago, Bartels and her curatorial staff at the Vancouver Art Gallery were looking for something that would shake up the museum's design programming--a manifesto--when Mau lectured in Vancouver to a sold out crowd of architects and designers. From his seat in the audience that night, curator Bruce Grenville seriously considered Mau's claims that design should be a force of change in the world, rather than something applied as an afterthought. Grenville recalls, "I thought, Maybe we should call out Bruce on these claims? Maybe this is the benchmark we need to measure our design projects for the future."   

Mau, who is no stranger to big, potentially groundbreaking projects, was game. While he began his career as a graphic designer, Mau and his team at Bruce Mau Design have worked on projects ranging from a new urban national park in Toronto to exhibits for a museum of biodiversity in Panama. Their architectural signage and typography found its way into four of the most prominent building openings this year: Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library, and Yoshio Taniguchi's expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "Massive Change" may have begun with an insight of Mau's, but it grew leg in this petri dish of design's potential.

In this project--unlike most in the design world--hope trumps beauty. "We didn't want to do an exhibition that was about aestheticizing objects," explains Grenville. "Instead we looked at capacity," Mau adds. "What   design makes possible, and how those developments are reshaping the economies we live in." Out went the Philipe Starck juicers, in came the flexible solar panels.           

Working with the seven students of the Institute Without Boundaries--Bruce Mau Design's yearlong in-house design school--they began by casting as wide a net as possible, looking for examples of people, products and ideas that demonstrate a massive change. Even (or perhaps especially) against the dark global backdrop of the past few years, they were surprised by how much good they found, says Vanessa Ahuactzin, a student at the Institute Without Boundaries who stayed on to become the coordinator of the exhibit. "When we went out and researched," Ahuactzin remembers, "we noticed that there were a lot of good things happening in the world, that not everything is about fear."

Then began what Bruce Mau Design calls the "iterative process": Ideas are boiled down, synthesized, grouped into categories they call "economies," and carefully measured against each other. "We're not saying to the visitors, This is a good thing and that's a bad thing," explained Ahuactzin. "We're just saying, this is what's happening and it's up to you to choose." "Massive Change" may be self-described as an "optimistic project," she stresses, "but it doesn't have a cotton-candy view of the world. It has a realistic tone."

Design becomes an ideology all its own, with seemingly no regard for conventional political positions. For example, the "Market Economies" chapter of the book (which corresponds to a room in the exhibition) suggests: "The Home Depots and Nikes of the world have greater capacity to achieve more for greater good because of their scale. One incremental change for them becomes massive change for the entire industry." The coy play on the show's title is a hallmark of the exhibition, as is the sound-bite aesthetic. As Mau admits, "The terrain is so broad, to get the big picture you've got to keep it pretty compact."   But it also reveals that this is a communications project, a multi-media exercise in sloganeering and savvy image deployment. Given that, it's not surprising that 50.1% of Bruce Mau Design recently acquired by MDC Partners, a Toronto-based international advertising firm.

One of project's most intriguing tag lines comes in the "urbanism" economy, where the exhibit pulls no punches in its argument. The idea to "embrace the plural and reject the romantic notion of the singular" pulls the rug out from under the idea of the building as precious object while simultaneously eliminating the field on which it rests. So forget that dream house, and its wooded acres. Instead, the hope of the world (which is, as the exhibit crisply puts it, "shelter for the entire human race") relies upon accepting the sheer magnitude of human presence: Nothing is wild and everything is managed. In other words, "everywhere is city." Mau elaborates: "There's no longer an exterior to our urban economy. I think it's such a dangerous idea that somehow the city is an object and that's what we have to worry about, while everything else can be trashed."

But here, as everywhere in a world of massive change, design offers solutions both material and conceptual: environmentally efficient building techniques, urban agriculture, even the rethinking of property laws in the developing world to encourage stable domestic shelter. The big concepts are all packed into the gallery, leaving it to the other media--website, book, radio show, and film--to flesh out the details.

Will it all be enough to change your worldview? In Ahuactzin's experience, the ideas get under your skin. "I come from a really small town, and when you start to tell people about all the things that are happening in the world they become really amazed, actually," she said, sounding a little amazed herself. She added: "It's not only the project that's the massive change, it's the massive change it brings to you."