Bruce Mau & Change

Next up on the PopTech stage was designer Bruce Mau from Toronto.

Bruce Mau's studio has gained international recognition for its expertise and innovation in identity articulation, research and conceptual programming, print design and production, environmental signage and wayfinding systems, and exhibition and product design. Recently his studio output has extended to dance performances, video installations, and ventures into the fields of architecture, urban planning, landscape design - and most recently education with the founding of The Institute without Boundaries.

He starts out emphasizing our need to be flexible and easily adapt to global changes. "Our world is changing and you can’t have this kind of dramatic change and expect that we’re going to work in the same way." This is how he sums up his most recent project, the Institute without Boundaries, which is an articulation of the future of design.

"The twentieth 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.” - Arnold Toynbee

Their goal: to drive people’s learning. They organized the exhibition around the following economies:

Urban economies
Movement economics
Energy economics
Information economics
Image economics
Market economics
Material economics
Manufacturing economics
Living economics
Military economics

"We started a radio program to get to the people who were making massive change," he says. "Doing this allows you to access creative people who are making an impact on the world in a direct and massive way."

Their research indicated that the world is developing a capacity to do practically anything we want to do. "It’s a new condition historically," he adds. "If the American government tried to achieve something, there’s nothing they couldn’t get to with the resources currently available to us. It’s no longer about a single designer, single country, single politician, but how all of these all linked together.

"When we looked at the patterns, we realized we would have to create urban shelters for the world. We’re adding one million people a week to urban cities around the world. And there’s a commitment to build homes to accommodate them."

Mobile homes are on the rise and he says with a laugh, "But I’ve yet to meet a mobile home architect."
It's true that we are committed to producing sustainable mobility. The idea of the individual moving freely is a powerful idea that has been embraced worldwide. We are asking ourselves, “how can we do this more intelligently around the world with less impact on the environment?”

They looked at Dean Kamon's work who has a commitment to changing things in such a significant way. “If its not going to change the world for the better, we shouldn’t be doing it.” He apparently lives his life that way and certainly develops and invents with this in mind, i.e., mobility, energy, water.

In information economies he claims, “we will build a global mind. We have to envision the world as something we can understand in a more meaningful way than we have in the past."

Frankly, the idea of building a global mind is scary and has dark dimensions however. By adding ten million pages to the net daily, every individual can add to a collective knowledge. We are living in an environment produced by a scientific revolution so to speak.

While some may not agree, I found his talk creative and uplifting.