Bruce Mau
World-leading visionary, innovator, designer and author, Bruce Mau is the co-founder of the Massive Change Network. His 25 years of experience in design innovation has included collaborations with many of the world’s leading institutions, corporations, heads of state, entrepreneurs and artists. For Bruce Mau, design is leadership — the power to imagine the vision of a prosperous future, and the method for working systemically to achieve that vision. While most designers use design to produce things, Mau uses design as a method to produce an abundant future and develop purposeful projects to create positive change in business, education, health, leadership and security.
Bruce Mau is the chairman emeritus and founder of Bruce Mau Design, with studios in Toronto and New York. He has used design to lead innovation projects with Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, MTV, Danish Architecture Center, Herman Miller, MoMA, Seattle Public Library, Panama Museum of Biodiversity, New Meadowlands Stadium, Miami’s American Airlines Arena, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Arizona State University; the countries of Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Panama; his long term collaborators have included Frank Gehry, Claes Oldenberg, Larry Gagosian, Minoru Mori, and Rem Koolhaas, among others.
Motivated by the certainty that the future demands a new breed of designer, Mau founded the Institute without Boundaries—an innovative, studio-based postgraduate program in collaboration with George Brown College, Toronto. Mau and his students created the groundbreaking exhibition and best-selling book, Massive Change (Phaidon)—a project that declared, “Massive Change is not about the world of design; it’s about the design of the world.”
Mau authored several award-winning books, including LifeStyle (Phaidon), S,M,L,XL (The Monacelli Press) in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas, Spectacle (Phaidon) with David Rockwell, New Tokyo Lifestyle Think Zone (Mori Art Center), and the iconic and celebrated aphoristic articulation of his personal philosophy and design strategies for unleashing creativity, The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.
Mau’s most recent book, The Third Teacher (Abrams), which he and his studio co-authored with OWP/P Architects and VS Furniture, presents a compendium of ways that design can transform teaching and learning for students, families and teachers to thrive in tomorrow’s world.
His design philosophies and practical applications are featured in the book, GLIMMER: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe the World, by Warren Berger (Penguin Press). According to Berger, “Bruce Mau seeks to prove that the power of design is boundless, and has the capacity to bring positive change on a global scale.” Mau is also featured in the feature-length documentary, “The 11th Hour,” produced and hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio and the Swedish documentary film, “The Plan,” directed by award-winning producer/director David Osterberg.
Distinguished award highlights from Mau’s career include the William and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Distinguished Fellow at the Segal Design Institute of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University; Louise Blouin Foundation’s Global Creative Leadership Award; AIGA Gold Medal for Communication Design; Chicago Global Visionaries Award; UCDA Design Competition Award and the Toronto Arts Award.
Mau continues to serve as a design teacher, critic and lectures on design innovation worldwide. He has served as Visiting Cullinan Professor at Rice University School of Architecture in Houston and has been a Visiting Critic at the University of Toronto School of Architecture and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Bruce Mau is the recipient of six honorary degrees from Columbia College, Chicago; Laurentia University, Sudbury, Ontario; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto; Emily Carr University, Vancouver, and Archeworks, Chicago.
