I just came across Bruce Mau’s students’ project website Massive Change. It seems to be full of interesting information. This is from the introduction,
Learn
Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of an new period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.
What is Massive Change?
And there is a call to action, to participate in this project. Finally I leave with you with a review from a Toronto newspaper for a balanced viewpoint;
The Institute Without Boundaries, which is always given second billing
after Mau’s name in the Massive Change credits, is a one-year graduate
design program run by Toronto’s George Brown College out of Mau’s
studio. For a fee of $12,000, a handful of students with undergraduate
degrees and often some interesting professional experience get to work
on a variety of projects under Mau’s tutelage. Massive Change was the
institute’s inaugural effort.
And that, I suspect, is the source of its weaknesses. It’s a student
project. I am not just talking about the show’s wild-eyed enthusiasm
and outrageous claims for the field of design: Mau doesn’t need any
young idealist to teach him idealism. He’s got plenty of his own,
explaining at the press preview that designers can’t afford cynicism;
they are paid to act.
Mau, who was quaffing water that he said was filtered from Singapore
sewage as he made those remarks, is also a master of the slick pitch,
with a fondness for the jargon-laden aphorism. Whoever coined the
slogans that introduce each of the economies — "We will create a
global mind," "We will make visible the as-yet invisible," "We will
enable sustainable mobility" — they sound very Mau.
Personally, I think that much of what they are saying is not only possible, but highly probable that it is already underway as a movement. Even if, as yet, unnoticed by the general public. After all, isn’t that, on one level, we are trying to do here?
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